Processing the scene in orbit before sending: UAE-French coalition injects a billion dollars in AI satellites

A coalition of the UAE's Marlan Space and the US's Loft Orbital is leading a $1 billion investment in France to build the Altair Next-Gen project, the world’s largest AI-dedicated satellite infrastructure. The plan was announced and the agreement signed at the International Space Summit in Paris in the presence of French President Emmanuel Macron, a step that establishes a new generation of orbital platforms that do more than image the Earth, they process what they see and make inferential decisions before sending data to ground stations.

The most notable technological shift in the project lies in the way data are handled, as the Altair Next-Gen satellites were designed to rely ondirect on-orbit analysis and transmitting events instead of streaming raw imagesThis architecture enables satellites to examine data from radar, optical and other sensors at the moment of capture, extracting the operational observation immediately, which shortens transmission bottlenecks and the time required to download and decode massive datasets on the ground.

Orbit Works, a company specializing in commercial low-Earth-orbit satellites, is manufacturing the first fifty satellites for the project at its facility in the Kizad area of Abu Dhabi. The company was founded in 2024 as a joint venture between Marlan Space, the space-investment arm of the Abu Dhabi-based global holding company, and Loft Orbital, which operates more than one hundred payloads and twenty AI missions in space and provides the project with technical innovations and operational expertise. The industrial move coincides with the global holding company, chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, signing an agreement to acquire an eighty-percent stake in Marlan Space to cement its presence in the space economy.

The first batch of satellites will serve the governments of France, European countries and the UAE, as well as commercial and sovereign customers worldwide. The initial operational applications of the Altair Next-Gen network focus onsecuring ports, protecting critical infrastructure and monitoring the maritime sectoras well as early detection of forest fires and managing response to natural disasters, where the time gap between observation and notification is an operational and field-level decisive factor.

This development reshapes infrastructure choices for operational entities in the Gulf and the Middle East, shifting maritime surveillance and logistics-lane security from reliance on rented broadband channels to process captured images to consuming ready-made inferential outputs generated directly above the atmosphere. Infrastructure security managers, port authorities and regional emergency teams no longer need to wait for unprocessed visual data to pass through intermediate stations; they can now build alert and risk-management systems on instantaneous event signals whose orbital platforms were produced locally.