I read The Verge piece this morning about Google and SpaceX reportedly talking about putting data centers into orbit, and the first thing that struck me was how absurd the distance gap is becoming. And your AI model is now potentially running on hardware in low Earth orbit. But your Gmail tab is six inches from your face. Somehow these are supposed to talk to each other.

The pitch for orbital compute is real enough. Free cooling, abundant solar, no land use, no neighbors complaining about transformer hum. And Google’s research blog has been quietly talking about this for a year, while Starlink’s existing launch cadence makes the logistics less ridiculous than it sounds. So fine. I believe the engineering is solvable.

But the architectural implication is what nobody is saying out loud.

Cloud just got 400 kilometers further away

Every additional hop you add between the user and the model is friction the user has to pay for. Latency, sure, though orbital roundtrips aren’t actually that bad once you do the math on signal speed. But the real cost is access. Because to use a cloud model on your work, that model needs to see your work. Today that means OAuth handshakes, API tokens, cloud browser sandboxes that pretend to be you, credentials syndicated across vendors you’ve barely heard of.

And now we’re adding a satellite uplink to the stack.

The session that’s already there

The thing already sitting in front of you, fully authenticated against Gmail and Notion and your CRM and your bank, is the Chrome tab you opened this morning. It has cookies. And it has your 2FA-validated session. It has the right user-agent string and the right device fingerprint. The work-shaped surface that every cloud agent is desperately trying to reconstruct via OAuth scopes and bearer tokens, the actual user-as-logged-in version of you, already exists, on your machine, in the tab you opened this morning.

And this is what makes the local browser agent approach feel less like a product category and more like the obvious thing. Dassi runs as a Chrome extension in the side panel. It reads the tab you’re already on. And it uses your existing login. There’s no second auth dance. So the model itself can live in orbit, in Iowa, in a datacenter on the moon for all the user cares, because what gets shipped over the wire is a question plus a piece of page context, not a credential bundle pretending to be you.

We wrote earlier about how cloud browser agents can’t see your tabs. And the orbital push is just the same problem with more launch insurance. The further the compute moves, the more elaborate the credential plumbing has to be to compensate. Every additional layer of credential plumbing is also a new place for your identity to be misrepresented or stolen.

What gets worse with distance

  • More network hops where session tokens can leak
  • More vendors in the breach chain
  • More OAuth scopes for cloud browsers pretending to be you
  • More places your prompt and your data have to physically transit

Compute can sprawl. Identity should not.

What doesn’t get worse with the orbital push: anything Dassi does, because the extension runs locally and ships only the model call upstream.

I keep coming back to this. The thing that should stay close to you is your identity surface — your active sessions, your unsent draft, the form you started filling out at 11pm last Tuesday. The thing that can move anywhere is matrix multiplication. Right now the industry has it exactly backwards. Companies are racing to put GPUs further away while also asking your identity to follow the GPUs out there, via tokens and credentials and sandboxed pseudo-browsers that have to spend their entire existence faking being you.

The local browser agent inverts that. The compute roams. The identity stays. You don’t authenticate to the agent. The agent borrows the authentication you already did, in the place you already did it.

What I think happens next

Orbital data centers will probably ship. And some workload will run there. It won’t be the part of AI that touches your inbox, because nobody is going to OAuth seventeen apps so that a satellite can read their email. So the bifurcation gets sharper, not blurrier: heavy compute drifts outward, the agentic layer collapses back into the browser tab. That’s the only direction the geometry actually supports.

The Verge article didn’t mean to make the case for local execution. It made it anyway.