If vertical integration defines the “how” of the modern stack, the “where” is undergoing a radical architectural shift. When I first evaluated the Orbital Edge back in 2026, processing telemetry and visual data in the vacuum of space was a theoretical roadmap item. With Google now deploying dedicated AI silicon into orbit to process imagery in situ, that frontier has officially transitioned from research to production hardware.
We are witnessing a historical inversion of computer vision. For fifty years, the discipline was tethered by a “backhaul-and-batch” mentality—requiring us to move massive datasets to centralized server racks to be “seen.” Today, we are decoupling the “eyes” from the data center. By pushing inference to the extreme edge—whether in remote industrial sensors or silicon orbiting at 17,000 mph—we are solving the fundamental physics of latency.
We’ve graduated from teaching software to recognize a face on a screen to engineering autonomous systems that interpret the world in real-time from the edge of the atmosphere. The future of vision isn’t found in higher pixel density; it’s found in the distributed intelligence required to process the world exactly where it happens.