China has sent a compute module to the Tiangong Space Station featuring Loongson-designed CPUs.

The Star Eye system was sent up as part of the Tianzhou-8 payload, the seventh resupply mission to the space station.

Chinese chip designer Loongson said that the chips used an undisclosed "advanced" process node. Made up of multiple modules, Star Eye features two heterogeneous cloud computing platforms, management and control systems, peripherals, and thermal control support structures.

The system is currently powered on and is undergoing testing. After that, Star Eye is planned to be used for ground radiation source signal acquisition, optical remote sensing image capture, and space-based computing, to achieve on-orbit identification and positioning of ground radiation sources.

It will also be used to test the on-orbit radiation resistance of the Loongson chip.

Specifics about the compute and storage performance of Star Eye were not shared.

"Let the cloud return to the sky," Hu Weiwu, chairman of Loongson Zhongke, said.

The Tiangong space station was first launched in 2021, and expanded through multiple modules in 2022. Another module is expected in 2026. That year, the Xuntian module will add a large space telescope with a field of view 300–350 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope.

China built its own series of space stations in part because the nation was blocked from the International Space Station by the US over military concerns.

HPE has similarly sent compute to space, with the Spaceborne Computer-1 and -2 systems. The latter computer was launched earlier this year, and is currently running a federated learning experiment that will independently train machine learning models and inference engines originally created in the cloud.

Beyond space stations, a number of companies are looking to deploy compute in space.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said last year that rocket company Blue Origin deploy a "large amount of radiation-tolerant compute" in space, while Axiom Space hopes to develop an 'orbital data center.' Lumen Orbit recently raised $10m for massive AI clusters in space, while NTT has partnered with SKY Perfect JSAT to launch its own space data centers in 2025.

The EU is also studying the concept of space data centers, and storage-focused Lonestar Data Holdings hopes to deploy data centers on the Moon.