LLMSpace: Carbon Footprint Modeling for Large Language Model Inference on LEO Satellites

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05615v2
• Date: Fri, 08 May 2026 02:30:19 GMT
• Title: LLMSpace: Carbon Footprint Modeling for Large Language Model Inference on LEO Satellites
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) impose rapidly growing energy demands, creating an emerging energy and carbon crisis driven by large-scale inference.<n>This paper presents textitLLMSpace, the first carbon modeling framework for LLM inference on AI-enabled LEO satellites.
• Score: 5.920779744985693
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) impose rapidly growing energy demands, creating an emerging energy and carbon crisis driven by large-scale inference. Solar-powered, AI-enabled low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites have been proposed to mitigate terrestrial electricity consumption, but their lifecycle carbon footprint remains poorly understood due to launch emissions, satellite manufacturing, and radiation-hardened hardware requirements. This paper presents \textit{LLMSpace}, the first carbon modeling framework for LLM inference on AI-enabled LEO satellites. LLMSpace jointly models operational and embodied carbon, peripheral subsystems, radiation-hardened accelerators and memories, and LLM-specific workload characteristics such as prefill-decode behavior and token generation. Using realistic satellite and GPU configurations, LLMSpace reveals key trade-offs among carbon footprint, inference latency, hardware design, and operational lifetime for sustainable space-based LLM inference. Source code: https://github.com/UnchartedRLab/LLMSpace.

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