Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall on using AI for national security around the globe and the promise of data centers in space 12/11/25

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Morgan Brennan sits down with Will Marshall, Planet Labs CEO, on the latest episode of Manifest Space. They discuss how the company is using AI in its satellite imagery to help countries quickly identify the location of security and economic threats around the world. Plus, the natural advantages for data centers in space—and how Planet Labs how to capitalize on the opportunity.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shares of Planet Labs soaring to new heights after smashing expectations for quarterly results. The Earth Data Analytics Company, also in the news as its satellite image of the Venezuelan oil tanker seized by the U.S., circulates in the media. In an interview just days before earnings and this latest geopolitical event, I sat down with Will Marshall, the CEO and co-founder of Planet Labs from the Reagan National Defense Forum. We discuss the power of AI coupled with the power of Earth data, and as speculation swirls about SpaceX's valuation, and now a possible IPO, the prospect of data centers in space. As launch costs come down, satellite costs come down, at some point it's obvious that the economics make more sense to put compute in space. And actually, you know, Google and others are running out of filing places that are suitable on the Earth, that have the right resource. and space literally for them. Space has a lot of space,

and you get eight times the power because your solar panels could be in sun all the time and various other things. You have free cooling to the background of space. So there's some fundamental technical advantages. It's just about the launch costs and the satellite cost. Planet works with NVIDIA to use its chips for edge computing, and more recently announced a project with Google

to fly TPUs in space. On this episode, Planet's Will Marshall, on AI in space and how it will affect life on Earth. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Will Marshall, he's CEO and co-founder of Planet Labs here at the Reagan National Defense Forum. It's great to speak with you. Great to see you again. Yeah. So given where we are, let's start a little bit with where Planet Labs

fits into this national security landscape. Yeah, absolutely. So, as you know, Planet is helping people make smarter decisions about things all around the planet. With 200 satellites, we image all the world. But the next question is, how do you take that imagery and make it useful? How do you actually abstract out to the answers that people need? And so we're doing a lot of work with AI on top of that imagery that looks at millions of images and finds the things that you need. Imagine you're an analyst in the US Navy, trying to look at the whole South China Sea.

So we help that analyst, monitor all of the South China Sea. In fact, we're monitoring 13 million square kilometers, an area just slightly bigger than the US. helping them identify ships that aren't going to be there or bunking activities, elicit things against oil embargoes and so on, and tracking that in one place. So AI enables us to do that sort of work at scale and brings them, so they don't have to look at all the images, they just gives them the answer, here's the ship that you need to look at, here's the challenging activity over there. We're doing another piece of work with Admiral Paparo here,

monitoring all of China for changes that he's interested in. strategic indications of threats that we're coming, maybe weeks or months in advance of any challenge, so that they can get ahead of that and hopefully prevent a war. You and I have talked about the possibility and the promise of AI and space. Are we at a critical juncture in terms of the capabilities and the technology being realized? 100%. I think it's, I've been tracking both of these things for a long time. Space first, of course, but space is in a revolution. Lower cost launch, lower cost satellites, changing the game, more satellites, more data. AI is in a revolution, processing data, enabled to get semantic

interface, you can just type your questions and get answers real quick of anything. These things are merging. Space and AI getting married and the upshot is an incredibly powerful thing. Large language models are doing exactly what they say, language assessments. So chat GBT or Gemini or whatever you use is basically enabling you to probe the text of the internet. and get text replies. Great. But imagine the power of applying that to Earth data where you can ask the Earth questions,

not just the text of the Internet, but if anything that's going on on the Earth, if there's a flooding, you can ask about it, if there's an earthquake, if there's a military activity, if you want to investigate as a journalist what's going on in a particular area, you can ask that questions of the physical planet.

The power of that is amazing. So yeah, AI and space are just coming together. I'll give you one more example in Brazil. We're monitoring all of the Brazilian Amazon, tracking deforestation and legal mining. And that AI, on top of our satellite data, enables these alerts that enables that Brazil federal police, people are to find exactly where to go to find the problem.

It's the power of satellite data and AI at scale. AI compute in space. What does that look like? How does that evolve? What does it mean for planet? Well, it's in a very exciting time. suddenly it got very excited by this and we we have started a project with Google to fly TPUs in space now it's very early but as launched costs come

down satellite costs come down at some point it's obvious that the economics make more sense to put compute in space and actually you know Google and others are running out of finding places that are suitable on the earth that have the right resources and and space literally for them space has a lot of space and you get eight times the power because your solar panels can be in sun all the time and various other things you have free cooling to the background of space so there's some fundamental technical advantages it's just about the launch costs and the satellite cost now we find that time where it's

exactly now that we can that those crafts are being crossed and we should be able to put these in space in time at lower cost it's early days so we don't doing some tech demos in the next year with Google to launch some of their TPUs, their advanced chips, and test the thermal configurations, the interspace links, because we've got a formation fly, clusters of these TPUs together, and we'll see where it goes. Again, we have a moonshop project,

as Google likes to call it, but it has a huge potential in the long-term future if it works out. And you work with NVIDIA as well? We also work with NVIDIA, yeah. In fact, we launched 38 satellites last week on a SpaceX rocket, and it included two of our next generation Pelican spacecraft, which have even higher resolution. We're building towards a 30 centimeter system, and the invidia chips that we put on there

enabled us to do computer at the edge. So instead of just waiting for the imagery to come down, the computer up there, it's an Nvidia GPU, can do ship detection, whatever it is you want to do, and then just send down the answers within minutes rather than waiting hours. So the edge of space, I guess, to be a little tongue-in-cheek here. Exactly, to the edge of space. Yeah, the cloud is going to be a cloud of above the cloud. The constellations, especially as you do build out these new more statistically,

more technically sophisticated satellites. How to think about that moving forward? Well, I mean, right now we're really focused on the earth imaging business and adding this AI on top with this intelligence that enables you to get answers around the planet. And I think the potential there, as I said, the large Earth model that you can answer anything on the physical planet, just like LLM's answer things or the text of the internet, is hugely powerful. It's going to have whole manner of applications.

But I am excited about the kind of things like compute in space that could start doing, taking energy-intensive infrastructure off Earth into orbit, and if you like, zone Earth for rural and light urban and keep the dirtier infrastructure on off-the-the-officer. that's the future that would be better for sustainability and it would be better for of course economically eventually so we're you know we're exploring that too yeah i know you said that's early days but i mean what do you think is that years away is that decades away is that closer than we all realize i think it's a bit of both um it's going to take some years to develop out the technology to scale these uh satellites to check that the thermal management can be done and

so on one of the challenges getting rid of all the power of these cpies use it's cooled with water on the earth cooling to the vacuum of space is a little bit harder in principle it's free but it's a little bit harder so there are some real technical challenges to work on and that's what we're keen to do and we'll update you as it goes so yeah early days but I think Sundar said just this week within 10 years he'd be surprised if this wasn't one of the dominant ways compute is done. So I think that sort of time line is about right.

Will Marshall, Planet Labs. It's great to speak with you. Thank you. Great to speak to you, too. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts. And by watching our coverage on Closing Bell overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.