India's space tech company Agnikul Cosmos and AI cloud provider NeevCloud are planning to launch data centers in space.

The latest of numerous companies to have expressed a desire to bring compute to space, the two have signed an agreement that will see a data center launched in orbit by the end of 2026.

As reported by ETTelecom, the agreement will see NeevCloud "deploy its space-based AI data center and run real-time AI inference applications on this patented platform designed and developed by Agnikul."

Agnikul is known for developing 3D printed rocks to launch small satellites.

Should the pilot launch be successful, the two aim to launch more than 600 Orbital Edge data centers over the next three years.

Agnikul's founder and CEO, Srinath Ravichandran, said of its technology: "Our convertible upper-stage technology lets these stages stay active and functional, turning them into usable assets that can host hardware and software in space, including compute or data capabilities. That's the next step for a space transportation company: you build, launch, recover, and then extend into orbit."

Agnikul's rockets will see the hardware hosted in the "upper stages," which are reusable, helping to reduce cost and capex for deployments.

"We are not just building a data center in space, we are building an entirely new layer of orbital inferencing infrastructure," added Narendra Sen, founder and CEO of NeevCloud.

Several companies are aiming to launch data centers in space, though the operational realities of doing so at scale will prove challenging.

Earlier this week, Starcloud filed to launch a constellation of 88,000 satellites, while SpaceX has proposed launching one million data center satellites. Others looking to follow suit include Amazon Leo, Blue Origin, Google through Project Suncatcher, and Axiom Space, NTT, Ramon.Space, and Sophia Space, to name but a few.