俺はホテルにいた。 壁紙は薄いベージュで、ところどころに古いシミが浮かび、エアコンはつけていないのに、どこか乾いた風のような音だけがしている。

ベッドに腰掛け、何気なくブラウン管テレビをつけた。 立方体に近い、やたら古いテレビだ。 昔はテレビスターがやたらいたが、このヘンテコな箱のデザインが、そうしたスターの雰囲気づくりに一役買っていたのだろうと思うほど、昔のテレビは妙な形をしている。

画面に映ったのは、黄色い衣装の男だった。 昭和の子ども向け科学番組に出てきそうな、妙に仕立ての良いスーツ風の衣装だ。白い手袋までしている。 一言で言えば、エセ科学者。

彼は実に楽しそうに語っていた。

「夜に洗濯物を干さない方が良い。なぜなら冷蔵庫の野菜が腐ってしまうから」

穏やかな声だった。 やけに耳に残る、古風な抑揚がある。

――いや、そんな事より今なんか変なこと言わなかったか。

思わずテレビに視線を戻す。 科学者はにこりと微笑み、同じ言葉をもう一度繰り返した。

「夜に洗濯物を干さない方が良い。なぜなら冷蔵庫の野菜が腐ってしまうから、です。ええ、これは極めて論理的な話ですよ。ご安心ください」

いやいやいや。 夜に干さない理由って普通は――乾きにくいとか、臭くなるとか、そういう話だろ。

すると彼は、まるで私の心の声を聞いたかのように頷いた。

「夜に洗濯物を干すと、太陽光ではなく月の光で服を乾かすことになりますね」

……いや。 正直、あれを「月の光で乾かしている」と思ったことはないが。

「月の光を浴びた服は、そこから低温の蒸気を出すようになるのです。昼間なら空気が活発なので散っていきますが、夜は空気の流れが悪くなるため、暖かい家の中に入り込んでくる。夜の蒸気は常に温かい場所へ向かう性質があるのです。」

画面の向こうで、彼の笑みが深くなる。

「その湿気は普通の水分とは違い、まとまったままふわふわ漂います。そして電気を使う家電のまわり、特に冷蔵庫に集まりやすい」 彼は続ける。

「すると冷蔵庫の中で細かい湿気が野菜にくっつき、目に見えない薄い水の膜を作る。その膜は空気を通しやすく、その膜を通じて空気が入り込み、野菜がどんどん酸化して腐っていくんですね。朝起きると毎回野菜が少し黒くなっているでしょう？これが原因なんですよ」

朝起きて野菜が腐ってる、なんて思ったことはない。

「科学とは、日常の中に潜む静かな連鎖を見つける営み。どうぞ今夜から、洗濯物と冷蔵庫の関係に、ほんの少し思いを馳せてみてください。――それでは、ごきげんよう」

そこで画面は突然ノイズに変わった。

しばらく、真っ暗になったブラウン管を見つめていた。 ホテルは変な局が映るんだなと思いながら、再び眠りについた。

Dankzij het befaamde Salduz arrest van het EHRM hebben daders recht op juridische bijstand, zelfs voordat zij worden ondervraagd. Slachtoffers staan er van A tot Z moederziel alleen voor. Dat zou zo niet mogen zijn volgens de internationale verplichtingen die Staten hebben ten aanzien van slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen. Waarom daders wel, en slachtoffers niet? Eigenlijk moeten we eerst definiëren wie slachtoffer is en wat seksueel geweld op minderjarigen is. Dat komt in een volgende publicatie. Weet dat Slachtoffers zowel de minderjarigen zijn die het seksueel geweld ondergaan, maar ook hun familie, en iedereen in hun omgeving die door het seksueel geweld op de minderjarige wordt geraakt.

Staten kiezen vrijwillig om partij te zijn aan hogere rechtsnormen, zoals internationale verdragen. Daarmee zegt een Staat dat zij haar wet ondergeschikt acht aan de internationale norm. Wat zeggen internationale normen met betrekking tot juridische bijstand voor Slachtoffers? Wij halen een aantal pijlers aan.

De bottom line is: Slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen hebben recht op kosteloze gespecialiseerde juridische bijstand, en in de realiteit zorgen Staten ervoor dat dat recht geschonden wordt.

In deze bijdrage vind je: – het kinderrechtenverdrag van de VN en haar protocol – Het Verdrag van Lanzarote – EU Richtlijn 2011/92/EU – Waarom dan krijgen Slachtoffers geen juridische bijstand? – En toch ? – Veroordeel de Staat ! – In afwachting …

Het kinderrechtenverdrag van de VN

Het kinderrechtenverdrag van de Verenigde Naties werd uitgebreid met het protocol over kinderhandel, kinderprostitutie en kinderpornografie dat specifiek seksueel geweld op minderjarigen behandelt. België werd partij op 17 maart 2006 en Nederland op 23 augustus 2005.

Haar art. 8 meldt niet expliciet dat Slachtoffers recht hebben op juridische bijstand, maar uit de tekst valt duidelijk op te maken dat men met ondersteuning van Slachtoffers ook juridische bijstand bedoelt.

De Richtlijnen verduidelijken, en melden in C.97.© volgende verplichtingen:

© Het verstrekken van gratis juridische bijstand, waaronder het toewijzen (afhankelijk van het nationale rechtssysteem) van een advocaat of voogd ad litem of een andere gekwalificeerde belangenbehartiger om het kind te vertegenwoordigen, en geestelijke gezondheidszorg door goed opgeleide professionals zoals kinderpsychiaters, psychologen en maatschappelijk werkers aan elk kindslachtoffer tijdens het strafrechtelijke proces. (vrije vertaling van “Providing free legal aid, including assigning (depending on the national legal system) a lawyer or guardian ad litem or another qualified advocate to represent the child, and mental health support by well-trained professionals such as child psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers to every child victim during the criminal justice process”)

De Belgische Grondwet heeft een art. 22bis, die het VN Kinderrechtenverdrag en haar protocollen rechtstreeks in de Grondwet verankerd. Wij, Belgen, vonden kinderrechten zo belangrijk dat het VN Verdrag en haar Protocollen in de Grondwet werden opgenomen.

Er dient door de Staat gratis juridische bijstand aan Slachtoffers te worden verleend.

Het Verdrag van Lanzarote

Het Verdrag van de Raad van Europa inzake de bescherming van kinderen tegen seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik, kortweg het Verdrag Van Lanzarote, dateert van 25/10/2007. Het Verdrag is van toepassing voor België sinds 01/07/2013, en voor Nederland is dat 01/07/2010.

Het is in Europa “het” verplichtende juridische instrument waar Staten zich aan “moeten” houden.

Volgens art. 1.1.b is de doelstelling van het Verdrag:

het beschermen van de rechten van kinderen die het slachtoffer zijn van seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik;

Haar art. 31.1.d start soft door te stellen dat:

het beschermen van de rechten van kinderen die het slachtoffer zijn van seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik;

Haar artikel 31.3 stelt dat de Staat Slachtoffers toegang tot rechtsbijstand moet waarborgen:

Elke Partij waarborgt dat slachtoffers toegang hebben tot rechtsbijstand, die wanneer gerechtvaardigd kosteloos wordt verstrekt, wanneer zij de status van partij in de strafrechtelijke procedure kunnen verkrijgen.

Haar art. 31.1 stelt verder dat zij die juridisch interveniëren, zoals advocaten, moeten een specifieke Slachtoffer gerichte opleiding hebben genoten:

Elke Partij neemt de wetgevende of andere maatregelen die nodig zijn, met inachtneming van de regels inzake de onafhankelijkheid van beoefenaars van juridische beroepen, om te waarborgen dat opleiding inzake de rechten van kinderen en seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik van kinderen beschikbaar is voor alle personen die bij het proces betrokken zijn, met name rechters, officieren van justitie en advocaten.

Ook het art. 36.1 bevestigt dat opleiding van juridische interveniënten, zoals advocaten, verplicht is:

Elke Partij neemt de wetgevende of andere maatregelen die nodig zijn, met inachtneming van de regels inzake de onafhankelijkheid van beoefenaars van juridische beroepen, om te waarborgen dat opleiding inzake de rechten van kinderen en seksuele uitbuiting en seksueel misbruik van kinderen beschikbaar is voor alle personen die bij het proces betrokken zijn, met name rechters, officieren van justitie en advocaten.

Tot slot zegt art. 35.1.f dat:

het kind vergezeld mag worden door zijn juridische vertegenwoordiger

De Memorie van toelichting bij het Verdrag van Lanzarote stelt in randnummer 225 dat Slachtoffers geen automatisch recht hebben tot juridische bijstand, maar punt 226 stelt op basis van art. 6 van het Europees Verdrag voor de Rechten van de Mens en jurisprudentie van het Europees Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens dat:

Het Europese Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens hield rekening met de complexiteit van de procedure en de emoties die daarmee gepaard gingen […] om kosteloze bijstand te verkrijgen van een officieel toegewezen advocaat. Dus zelfs als er geen wetgeving bestaat die toegang biedt tot een toegewezen advocaat in burgerrechtelijke zaken, is het aan de rechtbank om te beoordelen of, in het belang van de rechtspraak, een onvermogende partij die zich geen advocaat kan veroorloven, rechtsbijstand moet krijgen. (Vrije vertaling van: The Court took account of the complexity of the proceedings and the passions involved […] to obtain free assistance from an officially assigned defence counsel. Thus even in the absence of legislation affording access to an officially assigned defence counsel in civil cases, it is up to the court to assess whether, in the interests of justice, a destitute party unable to afford a lawyer's fees must be provided with legal assistance.)

Iedereen weet welke extreme emoties Slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen ondergaan. Bijvoorbeeld omschreef de Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery van de Verenigde Naties incest in het kader van het Slavernij Verdrag met de meest extreme bewoordingen ooit on its eighteenth session, punten 67 and 68”) (meer daarover in een toekomstige bijdrage).

Dus, zelfs al is er geen nationale wetgeving die Slachtoffers het recht geeft tot bijstand door een advocaat, en zelfs buiten de strafrechtelijke procedure in burgerrechtelijke procedures met betrekking tot of samenhangend met seksueel geweld op minderjarigen, moeten Slachtoffers volgens het Verdrag van Lanzarote bijgestaan kunnen worden door een advocaat, die sowieso specifiek opgeleid moet zijn, en gezien de emotionele tol op slachtoffers de Slachtoffers vanwege de Staat kosteloos bijstaat.**

EU Richtlijn

Er wordt al jaren gewerkt aan een verbetering van de huidig geldende EU Richtlijn 2011/92/EU ter bestrijding van seksueel misbruik en seksuele uitbuiting van kinderen en kinderpornografie.

Art. 20.2 stelt:

De lidstaten zorgen ervoor dat kindslachtoffers, onverwijld, toegang hebben tot juridisch advies en, overeenkomstig de rol die het desbetreffende rechtsstelsel aan het slachtoffer toebedeelt, vertegenwoordiging in rechte, onder meer om schadevergoeding te eisen. Juridisch advies en vertegenwoordiging in rechte moeten kosteloos zijn wanneer het slachtoffer niet over voldoende financiële middelen beschikt.

Randnummer 32 stelt:

Kaderbesluit 2001/220/JBZ stelt een aantal rechten van het slachtoffer in de strafprocedure vast, waaronder het recht op bescherming en schadevergoeding. Voorts dienen kinderen die het slachtoffer zijn van seksueel misbruik, seksuele uitbuiting en kinderpornografie toegang te krijgen tot juridisch advies en, overeenkomstig de rol die het toepasselijke rechtsstelsel aan het slachtoffer toebedeelt, tot vertegenwoordiging in rechte, ook voor het vorderen van een schadevordering. Dit juridische advies en deze vertegenwoordiging zouden ook door de bevoegde autoriteiten kunnen worden verleend in het geval de schadevergoeding van de staat wordt gevorderd. Het juridische advies heeft ten doel slachtoffers in staat te stellen informatie en advies te krijgen over de verschil lende mogelijkheden waarover zij beschikken. Juridisch advies dient te worden verstrekt door iemand die een passende juridische opleiding heeft genoten, maar dit hoeft niet noodzakelijk een jurist te zijn. Juridisch advies en, overeenkomstig de rol die het toepasselijke rechts stelsel aan het slachtoffer toebedeelt, vertegenwoordiging in rechte moeten kosteloos zijn, in elk geval wanneer het slachtoffer over onvoldoende financiële middelen be schikt, en conform de nationale procedures van de lid staten beschikbaar zijn.

Duidelijk. Zowel België als Nederland moeten “onverwijld” zorgen dat Slachtoffers juridisch advies krijgen, die, ook zoals de jurisprudentie van het EHRM eerder besproken, kosteloos moet zijn.

Kaderbesluit 2001/220/JBZ werd ondertussen wel al vervangen door de Richtlijn 2012/29/EU tot vaststelling van minimumnormen voor de rechten, de ondersteuning en de bescherming van slachtoffers van strafbare feiten. Deze laatste is ook aan herziening toe, maar tot zolang is volgens art. 4.1.d :

1. De lidstaten zorgen ervoor dat het slachtoffer zonder on nodige vertraging vanaf zijn eerste contact met een bevoegde autoriteit de volgende informatie wordt aangeboden, teneinde hem in staat te stellen toegang te hebben tot de in deze richtlijn opgenomen rechten: d) hoe en onder welke voorwaarden het slachtoffer toegang krijgt tot juridisch advies, rechtsbijstand en andere vormen van advies;

Het Randnummer 38 verduidelijkt:

Aan personen die bijzonder kwetsbaar zijn of zich in situaties bevinden waarin zij worden blootgesteld aan een bijzonder hoog risico op schade, zoals mensen die het slachtoffer zijn van herhaald geweld in hechte relaties, en slachtoffers van gendergerelateerd geweld of van andere strafbare feiten in een lidstaat waarvan zij geen onderdaan of inwoner zijn, moet gespecialiseerde ondersteuning en wettelijke bescherming worden verstrekt. Gespecialiseerde hulporganisaties moeten gebaseerd zijn op een geïntegreerde en doelgerichte benadering, die in het bijzonder rekening houdt met de specifieke behoeften van slachtoffers, de ernst van de als gevolg van het strafbare feit geleden schade, alsmede de relatie tussen slacht offers, daders, kinderen en hun ruimere sociale omgeving. Een belangrijke taak van deze organisaties en hun personeel, aan wie een belangrijke rol toekomt bij het verlenen van ondersteuning aan het slachtoffer bij het herstel en het te boven komen van mogelijke schade of een mogelijk trauma als gevolg van een strafbaar feit, moet erin bestaan het slachtoffer te informeren over de in deze richtlijn opgenomen rechten zodat hij beslissingen kan nemen in een ondersteunende omgeving waarin hij met waardigheid, respect en gevoel wordt behandeld. De soorten ondersteuning die door deze gespecialiseerde hulporganisaties moeten worden geboden, kunnen om vatten: het verschaffen van onderdak en veilige opvang, eerste medische zorg, doorverwijzing voor medisch en forensisch onderzoek met het oog op bewijsvergaring in het geval van verkrachting of aanranding, kort- of langdurende psychologische bijstand, traumazorg, juridisch advies, belangenbehartiging en specifieke diensten voor kinderen als directe of indirecte slachtoffers.

Waarom dan krijgen Slachtoffers geen juridische bijstand?

Europa probeert al jaren Richtlijn 2012/29/EU aan de juridische realiteit van hogere rechtsnormen aan te passen omdat onze politici weten dat er iets fundamenteel met de Richtlijn schort. Dat aanpassen lukt niet omdat lidstaten niet willen betalen voor die bijstand, vinden dat slachtoffers te veel geld kosten aan de Staat.

Randnummer 47 van de Richtlijn 2012/29/EU stelt:

Van slachtoffers mag niet worden verwacht dat zij kosten maken in verband met hun deelname aan een strafprocedure.

Tot zover is alles nog goed. Maar dan onder hetzelfde randnummer 47:

De lidstaten moeten worden verplicht alleen noodzakelijke uitgaven van het slachtoffer in verband met zijn deelname aan de strafprocedure te vergoeden en van hen kan niet worden gevergd dat zij de honoraria voor juridische bijstand aan het slachtoffer vergoeden. De lidstaten moeten in staat zijn in het nationale recht voorwaarden voor de vergoeding van kosten op te leggen, zoals termijnen voor het eisen van terugbetaling, standaardtarieven voor reis- en verblijfkosten en maximumbedragen voor dagvergoedingen wegens derving van inkomsten. Het recht op vergoeding van kosten in strafprocedures mag niet ontstaan in een situatie waarin een slachtoffer een verklaring over een strafbaar feit aflegt. Kosten behoeven alleen te worden vergoed indien het slachtoffer is verplicht of door de bevoegde autoriteiten is verzocht aanwezig te zijn en actief aan de strafprocedure deel te nemen.

En toch ?

Het VN kinderrechtenverdrag en haar protocol zijn van 2000, Lanzarote is van 2007, en de EU Richtlijn is van 2012. Het Standstill principe, dat in België is verankerd in art. 23 van de Grondwet en in de internationale rechtsorde steeds aanwezig is, zorgt ervoor dat verleende rechten niet mogen onderworpen worden aan later opgeworpen restricties of voorwaarden. Er zijn ook het Verdrag van Wenen inzake het verdragenrecht en het Verdrag van Wenen inzake het Verdragenrecht tussen Staten en Internationale Organisaties of tussen Internationale Organisaties, beide minstens mits hun art. 18, die de Staat verbiedt om een handeling te stellen tegen een Verdrag.

En toch, Richtlijn 2012/29/EU heeft een Slachtoffer rechten schendend randnummer 47. Europa heeft de bescherming van Slachtoffers verminderd uit vermeende financiële belangen van de lidstaten.

Ondanks art. 23 en 22bis van de Grondwet … “O dierbaar België, o heilig land der kinderprutsers …” tot op vandaag geen advocaat voor Slachtoffers van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen, noch voor Slachtoffers van kinderhandel trouwens.

Veroordeel de Staat !

En welk Slachtoffer heeft de centen, de emotionele stabiliteit, de tijd, de energie, de kennis en het kunnen, het doorzettingsvermogen, … ? om dat te doen? Hoe zou je daar ook maar aan beginnen? Wie kan bij welk gerecht terecht?

| | individueel slachtoffer | groep slachtoffers | Staat | | — | — | — | — | | EHRM tegen Staat | ja | moeilijk | neen | | CURIA tegen Staat | ja | ja | ja | | ICC tegen individuele autoriteit | moeilijk | ja | enkel subsidiair | | ICJ tegen Staat | neen | neen | ja | | nationale rechtbank | ja | ja | moeilijk |

Een voorbeeld is de veroordeling van België door een nationale rechtbank voor misdaden tegen de mensheid in 2024. Het kan dus, echt. Maar vergeet niet dat de “ego” van de advocaat er ook voor kan zorgen dat het niet wordt gehaald. In die zaak wilde men het Vaticaan veroordelen in plaats van de Belgische Staat …

In afwachting …

In afwachting dat Slachtoffers daadwerkelijk toegang krijgen tot juridische bijstand kunnen slachtoffers niet anders dan via juridisch knutselen te pogen voor een advocaat te zorgen.

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children for status is een onafhankelijk collectief dat schuldig verzuim door de Staat ten aanzien van seksueel geweld op minderjarigen en kinderhandel oplossingsgericht documenteert en aanklaagt

An anonymous post not published before.

Sydney is gorged with humidity, and I understand what going troppo is all about.

The question used to be simple: who has the best algorithm? For a decade, the artificial intelligence race rewarded clever code. Researchers at university labs and scrappy startups could publish a paper, train a model on rented cloud compute, and genuinely compete with the biggest players on the planet. That era is ending. The new race belongs to whoever controls the physical stack, from the launchpad to the server rack to the orbital relay station beaming data back to Earth.

In February 2026, SpaceX absorbed xAI in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion, according to Bloomberg. The transaction, structured as a share exchange, merged rocket manufacturing, satellite broadband, and frontier AI development under a single corporate umbrella. Elon Musk described the result as “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” Days later, SpaceX filed with the Federal Communications Commission for authorisation to launch up to one million satellites as part of what it called an “orbital data centre.” The filing proposed satellites operating between 500 and 2,000 kilometres in altitude, functioning as distributed processing nodes optimised for large-scale AI inference.

This is not incremental progress. It is a structural break. And it raises a question that the entire technology industry will spend the next decade answering: does the future of artificial intelligence belong to whoever writes the smartest code, or to whoever controls the infrastructure on which all code must run?

The Stack Nobody Else Owns

To understand why the SpaceX-xAI combination matters, you need to see the full vertical stack it now commands. At the bottom sits rocket manufacturing and launch services. SpaceX launched more than 2,500 Starlink satellites in 2025 alone and remains on track to exceed its projected $15.5 billion in revenue for that year. The company generated an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15 billion to $16 billion of revenue in 2025, according to Reuters. No other entity on Earth can put hardware into orbit at remotely comparable cost or cadence.

One layer up sits the satellite constellation itself. More than 9,500 Starlink satellites have been launched to date, with roughly 8,000 functioning. The network already provides broadband connectivity across six continents. Next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, slated for deployment beginning in 2026 aboard Starship, will deliver more than 20 times the capacity of current V2 satellites. Each V3 satellite will support terabit-class bandwidth and connect to the broader constellation via laser mesh links capable of up to one terabit per second. Current Starlink satellites already carry three lasers operating at up to 200 gigabits per second, forming a mesh network that routes data across the constellation without touching the ground. This means the network can move information between continents at the speed of light through vacuum, which is roughly 47 per cent faster than light travels through fibre optic cables.

Then comes the AI layer. Before the merger, xAI had already built Colossus, widely regarded as the world's largest AI supercomputer. Located in a repurposed Electrolux factory in Memphis, Tennessee, Colossus went from conception to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in just 122 days, going live on 22 July 2024. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that projects of this scale typically take around four years, making the deployment remarkably fast. The facility then doubled to 200,000 GPUs in another 92 days. As of mid-2025, Colossus comprises 150,000 H100 GPUs, 50,000 H200 GPUs, and 30,000 GB200 GPUs, with stated plans to expand beyond one million GPUs. The system uses NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and achieves 95 per cent data throughput with zero application latency degradation or packet loss. It draws up to 250 megawatts from the grid, supplemented by a 150-megawatt Megapack battery system, with an expansion target of 1.2 gigawatts.

Finally, the communications layer ties everything together. Starlink already provides the backbone for global data relay, and the proposed orbital data centre satellites would connect to Starlink via high-bandwidth optical links before routing down to ground stations. The result is a closed loop: SpaceX builds the rockets, launches the satellites, operates the network, trains the AI models, and serves the inference requests, all without depending on a single external supplier for any critical link in the chain.

Jensen Huang, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, described AI as a “five-layer cake” comprising energy, chips, infrastructure, AI models, and applications. He called the current moment “the largest infrastructure build-out in human history” and estimated that the next five years would present a $3 trillion to $4 trillion AI infrastructure opportunity. The SpaceX-xAI merger represents perhaps the most aggressive attempt by any single entity to own every layer of that cake simultaneously.

Why the Grid Cannot Keep Up

The rationale for moving AI infrastructure into orbit begins with a terrestrial crisis. The primary constraint on AI expansion is no longer capital or algorithmic talent. It is electricity.

According to the International Energy Agency, global electricity consumption by data centres is projected to more than double by 2030, reaching approximately 945 terawatt hours, with AI workloads as the primary driver. In the United States specifically, the Energy Information Administration projects total electricity consumption will reach record levels in both 2025 and 2026, rising from about 4,110 billion kilowatt hours in 2024 to more than 4,260 billion kilowatt hours in 2026. Data centres already consume more than 4 per cent of the country's total electricity supply.

The numbers at the facility level are staggering. The Stargate project, a $500 billion AI infrastructure joint venture announced by President Donald Trump in January 2025 involving OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, has already brought its flagship site in Abilene, Texas online. That single campus houses hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 GPUs and pulls roughly 900 megawatts of power. Meta is developing a one-gigawatt “Prometheus” cluster and has plans for a five-gigawatt “Hyperion” facility. A single AI-related task can consume up to 1,000 times more electricity than a traditional web search, which explains why a handful of AI facilities can destabilise a regional power supply in ways that hundreds of conventional data centres never could.

The grid simply cannot keep pace. A survey found that 72 per cent of data centre industry respondents consider power and grid capacity to be “very or extremely challenging.” Power constraints are extending data centre construction timelines by 24 to 72 months. In the PJM regional grid serving 65 million people across the eastern United States, capacity market clearing prices for the 2026 to 2027 delivery year surged to $329.17 per megawatt, more than ten times the $28.92 per megawatt price just two years earlier. Regional grids in many cases cannot accommodate large-scale data centres without transmission and distribution upgrades that require five to ten years of planning, permitting, and construction.

This is the opening that orbital infrastructure exploits. In space, continuous access to solar energy eliminates dependence on terrestrial power grids. The vacuum provides natural cooling, removing one of the most expensive and water-intensive requirements of ground-based data centres. A typical terrestrial data centre uses 300,000 gallons of water daily for cooling, with the largest facilities consuming 5 million gallons, equivalent to the demands of a town of 50,000 residents. And because orbital platforms sit above national borders, they bypass the community resistance and permitting bottlenecks that have slowed terrestrial expansion to a crawl.

Musk has stated that deploying one million tonnes of satellites per year could add approximately 100 gigawatts of AI computing capacity, with the potential to scale to one terawatt annually. “My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space,” he wrote. Whether that timeline proves accurate or wildly optimistic, the strategic logic is clear: if you cannot plug into the grid fast enough, you go above it.

The Terrestrial Rivals and Their Structural Gaps

No competitor currently matches this vertical integration, though several are trying to close the gap through different strategies.

Amazon represents the most credible challenger, combining Project Kuiper (rebranded as Amazon Leo in November 2025) with AWS cloud infrastructure. Amazon has invested over $10 billion in launch contracts alone and plans a constellation of 3,236 LEO satellites across three orbital shells. As of early 2026, the company has launched more than 200 production satellites, with its first Ariane 6 mission in February 2026 deploying 32 satellites in a single flight. However, Amazon faces an FCC deadline to deploy 1,618 satellites by July 2026, a requirement it is statistically unlikely to meet at current launch cadence. In January 2026, Amazon filed for a regulatory waiver to extend this deadline. The total capital expenditure for the first-generation system is estimated between $16.5 billion and $20 billion, significantly exceeding initial guidance.

The structural gap is illuminating. Amazon must purchase launches from external providers, including, remarkably, SpaceX's own Falcon 9 rockets. It does not manufacture its own launch vehicles. Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-founded rocket company, has yet to achieve the launch cadence necessary to serve as Kuiper's primary deployer. And while AWS provides formidable cloud infrastructure on the ground, with plans for more than 300 ground stations to interface with the Leo constellation, Amazon has not announced plans for orbital compute capabilities comparable to SpaceX's vision. The result is a competitor that owns significant pieces of the stack but not the complete vertical chain.

The European Union is pursuing sovereignty through IRIS squared, its Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite programme. Awarded to the SpaceRISE consortium of SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat in October 2024, IRIS squared carries a budget of 10.6 billion euros, including 6.5 billion euros from public funding and over 4 billion euros from industry. The system plans approximately 290 satellites across LEO and MEO orbits. But the first launch is not envisioned until 2029, with full operational capacity expected in 2030. The programme's urgent geopolitical motivation became sharper after the February 2025 suspension of United States military aid to Ukraine, which raised questions about continued Starlink availability and underscored Europe's dependency on American infrastructure. By the time the European constellation reaches operational status, SpaceX may have tens of thousands of additional satellites in orbit.

China presents a different kind of challenge, one driven by state coordination rather than corporate integration. The Guowang constellation aims for 13,000 satellites, with plans to launch 310 in 2026, 900 in 2027, and 3,600 annually beginning in 2028. The Qianfan constellation, backed by the Shanghai municipal government and developed by Shanghai SpaceCom Satellite Technology, targets 15,000 satellites by 2030. Most significantly for the AI infrastructure question, China launched the “Three-Body Computing Constellation” in May 2025 via a Long March-2D rocket, sending 12 satellites into orbit as a first batch. Developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation in partnership with Zhejiang Lab, each satellite carries an 8-billion-parameter AI model capable of 744 tera operations per second. Collectively, the initial 12 satellites achieved 5 peta operations per second, equivalent to a top-tier supercomputer. The satellites demonstrated the ability to classify astronomical phenomena and terrestrial infrastructure with 94 per cent accuracy without ground intervention, and by processing data in space they reduce downlink data volume by a factor of 1,000 for specific tasks. Plans call for scaling to 2,800 satellites delivering exa-scale compute power by 2030.

China's approach demonstrates that the orbital AI concept is not unique to SpaceX. But China lacks a single vertically integrated entity controlling the entire stack. Its satellite programmes are distributed across state-owned enterprises, private companies, and municipal governments. The coordination overhead of this distributed model may prove a disadvantage against a single entity that can make decisions at the speed of a corporate hierarchy rather than a bureaucratic one.

The Data Feedback Loop

Vertical integration does not merely reduce costs. It creates a compounding advantage through data feedback loops that terrestrial-only competitors cannot replicate.

Consider what happens when the same entity operates both the satellite constellation and the AI models. Starlink generates vast quantities of real-time data about atmospheric conditions, signal propagation, orbital debris patterns, and network traffic flows across the entire globe. That data feeds directly into xAI's models, which can optimise satellite operations, predict hardware failures, and improve routing algorithms. The improved operations generate better data, which produces better models, which further improve operations. This is the flywheel effect that has powered platform monopolies in the internet age, now extended to orbital infrastructure.

The Harvard Business Review noted in November 2025 that businesses across industries are using real-time satellite data to gain competitive advantage, with the number of active satellites tripling in five years and projected to reach 60,000 by 2030. Modern satellites equipped with AI and edge computing have become “smart tools for predictive logistics, environmental monitoring, and fast disaster response.” Yet only 18 per cent of surveyed executives expect to scale these tools soon, held back by the perception that space technology is too complex for daily business. A vertically integrated provider that can package satellite data, AI analysis, and connectivity into a single service removes that complexity barrier entirely.

The implications for training data are equally significant. An entity with global satellite coverage has access to a continuously updated stream of Earth observation data that no terrestrial competitor can match. Remote sensing, weather patterns, maritime tracking, agricultural monitoring, urban development, and infrastructure change detection all become training inputs. When the AI models trained on this data are then used to optimise the satellite constellation that gathered it, the loop closes in a way that generates structural advantages compounding over time.

The Algorithmic Counterargument

Against this infrastructure-first thesis stands a powerful rejoinder: DeepSeek.

In January 2025, the Chinese AI lab released its R1 reasoning model, achieving performance competitive with OpenAI's o1 on mathematical and coding benchmarks. The claimed training cost was approximately $5.6 million using just 2,000 GPUs over 55 days, perhaps 5 per cent of what OpenAI spent on comparable capability. DeepSeek's architectural innovations, including Multi-Head Latent Attention and its proprietary Mixture of Experts approach, demonstrated that clever engineering could substitute for brute-force compute to a remarkable degree. One year later, DeepSeek R1 remained the most liked open-source model on Hugging Face.

This matters because it challenges the assumption that infrastructure alone determines capability. If a relatively small team with constrained hardware access can produce frontier-quality models, then perhaps the vertically integrated orbital stack is an expensive solution to a problem that algorithmic efficiency will solve more cheaply. The RAND Corporation noted that DeepSeek's success “calls into question” the assumption that Washington enjoys a decisive advantage due to massive compute budgets.

But the counterargument has limits. As the Centre for Strategic and International Studies noted, while DeepSeek lowered AI entry barriers, it “has not achieved a disruptive expansion of capability boundaries nor altered the trajectory of AI development.” Its innovations represent refinements of existing techniques rather than fundamental breakthroughs. And critically, DeepSeek's efficiency gains have not reduced aggregate demand for compute. Global investment in AI infrastructure continues to accelerate, with Big Tech capital expenditure crossing $300 billion in 2025 alone, including $100 billion from Amazon, $80 billion from Microsoft, and substantial commitments from Alphabet and Meta.

The Jevons Paradox looms large. As AI becomes cheaper to run per unit, it proliferates into more applications, driving total demand higher. Google reported that over a 12-month period, the energy footprint of its median Gemini Apps text prompt dropped by 33 times while delivering higher quality responses. Yet Google's total electricity consumption still rose 27 per cent year over year. Efficiency gains are real, but they are being overwhelmed by the velocity of adoption. McKinsey forecasts $6.7 trillion in global capital for data centre infrastructure through 2030.

Research published on ResearchGate in 2026 argues explicitly that “infrastructure architecture itself, distinct from algorithmic innovation, constitutes a significant lever” for AI capability. The OECD's November 2025 report on competition in AI infrastructure identified “high concentration and barriers to entry” at every level of the AI supply chain, with “very high capital requirements” and “substantial economies of scale” creating structural advantages for incumbents. The report warned that vertical relationships where cloud providers also develop and deploy AI models could “make it hard for independent model developers to compete.”

The evidence suggests not an either-or dynamic but a hierarchy: algorithmic innovation remains necessary, yet infrastructure control increasingly determines who can deploy those algorithms at scale, who can iterate fastest, and who can serve the billions of inference requests that define commercial AI success.

Infrastructure as Geopolitical Lever

The implications extend far beyond corporate competition. As the Atlantic Council noted in its assessment of how AI will shape geopolitics in 2026, national policymakers are seeking to “impose greater control over critical digital infrastructure” including compute power, cloud storage, and microchips. The push to control this infrastructure is evolving into what analysts call a “battle of the AI stacks.”

An entity that controls orbital infrastructure operates from a position of extraordinary geopolitical leverage. Satellites do not require host-country permission to overfly territory. They can provide connectivity and compute to any point on the globe, bypassing national firewalls, regulatory regimes, and infrastructure deficits. A vertically integrated space-AI platform could, in theory, offer AI services to any government or enterprise on Earth without depending on any terrestrial intermediary.

This is precisely why Europe is investing 10.6 billion euros in IRIS squared and why China is racing to deploy its own constellations. The fear is not merely commercial disadvantage but strategic dependency. If the world's most capable AI inference runs on orbital infrastructure controlled by a single American corporation, then every nation without comparable capability becomes a customer rather than a sovereign actor in the AI age. The scarcity of satellite frequency and orbital resources, governed by a “first come, first served” principle at the International Telecommunication Union, adds urgency to the deployment race.

The OECD's 2025 competition report flags the cross-border implications directly: “enforcement actions, merger reviews, and policy interventions in one jurisdiction can have global implications.” The organisation recommends that competition authorities consider “ex ante measures, such as interoperability requirements” to address the risk of abuse of dominance in AI infrastructure markets.

Huang's Davos framing is instructive here. He urged every country to “build your own AI, take advantage of your fundamental natural resource, which is your language and culture; develop your AI, continue to refine it, and have your national intelligence part of your ecosystem.” But this advice assumes access to the underlying infrastructure stack. For nations that lack domestic launch capability, satellite manufacturing, and hyperscale compute, “building your own AI” means renting someone else's stack. And the landlord's terms are not always negotiable.

The Skeptics and the Technical Realities

None of this means orbital AI infrastructure is inevitable or imminent. The technical challenges remain formidable.

Kimberly Siversen Burke, director of government affairs for Quilty Space, told Via Satellite that orbital data centres “remain speculative” as a near-term revenue driver, citing “unproven economics, aging chips, latency, and limited use cases like defence, remote sensing, and sovereign compute.” She noted that linking SpaceX to AI infrastructure demand gives the company “valuation scaffolding” but cautioned that the economics remain unproven. A constellation of one million satellites with five-year operational lives would require replacing 200,000 satellites annually just to maintain capacity, roughly 550 per day. Radiation hardening, thermal management in vacuum conditions, and limited repair capabilities all represent unsolved engineering problems at scale.

The financial picture is also sobering. xAI was reportedly burning approximately $1 billion per month prior to the merger. SpaceX's $8 billion annual profit provides a significant cushion, but orbital data centres represent capital expenditure on a scale that would strain even the most profitable company on Earth. The planned SpaceX IPO, potentially raising up to $50 billion at a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion according to the Financial Times, would provide additional capital, but investors will demand evidence that orbital compute can generate returns within a reasonable time horizon.

There is also the question of latency. Orbital infrastructure at 500 to 2,000 kilometres altitude introduces signal propagation delays that make it unsuitable for applications requiring single-digit millisecond response times. Terrestrial data centres will remain essential for latency-sensitive workloads like autonomous vehicles, high-frequency trading, and real-time robotics. Orbital compute is better suited to batch processing, model training, and inference tasks where slightly higher latency is acceptable.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appears to be hedging this bet from a different angle. In March 2025, he took over as CEO of Relativity Space, a rocket startup with $2.9 billion in orders and a heavy-lift Terran R vehicle capable of carrying up to 33.5 metric tonnes to low Earth orbit, scheduled for its first launch at the end of 2026. Schmidt subsequently confirmed that his acquisition was connected to plans for orbital data centres, following congressional testimony in April 2025 where he described the “rapidly escalating energy demands of AI systems and the looming strain they are expected to place on national power infrastructure.” His approach differs from Musk's in scale and speed, but the strategic logic is identical: if terrestrial constraints are throttling AI growth, space offers an alternative path.

Consolidation on the Ground Mirrors Ambition in Orbit

The vertical integration thesis is not confined to space. On the ground, the satellite industry is consolidating rapidly. In July 2025, SES completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of Intelsat, creating a combined fleet of approximately 90 geostationary satellites and nearly 30 medium Earth orbit satellites. The FCC approved the merger partly because the combined entity would “more aggressively compete against Starlink and other LEO providers.” SES projects synergies with a total net present value of 2.4 billion euros.

This deal followed a wave of satellite industry consolidation that included Viasat's acquisition of Inmarsat and Eutelsat's acquisition of OneWeb. The FCC's order encapsulated the competitive pressures: with terrestrial fibre networks and streaming services reducing demand for satellite content distribution, legacy operators are being squeezed simultaneously by faster, higher-capacity LEO constellations. Consolidation is the survival strategy.

The satellite communication market was valued at $23.1 billion in 2024 and is growing at 12.3 per cent annually. The AI-specific segment is growing even faster, with the AI in satellite internet market projected to expand from $2.52 billion in 2025 to $8.91 billion by 2030, driven by a compound annual growth rate of 29 per cent. The pattern is consistent: companies are combining manufacturing control, AI-driven network optimisation, and cross-sector service delivery because the market rewards integration over specialisation.

From Algorithm Wars to Infrastructure Empires

The shift from algorithmic competition to infrastructure control represents something more fundamental than a change in business strategy. It represents a change in what determines power in the AI age.

For most of the past decade, the AI field operated on a relatively democratic premise. Breakthrough papers were published openly. Pre-trained models were shared on platforms like Hugging Face. Cloud compute could be rented by the hour. A brilliant researcher with a laptop and a credit card could, in principle, contribute to the frontier. DeepSeek's January 2025 release of R1 as an open-source model demonstrates that this democratic impulse remains alive.

But the infrastructure layer is not democratic. You cannot rent a rocket. You cannot subscribe to an orbital data centre. You cannot share a satellite constellation on GitHub. The physical assets required for vertically integrated space-AI infrastructure cost tens of billions of dollars, take years to deploy, and depend on regulatory approvals that only a handful of entities have the political influence to secure.

The Deloitte 2026 tech trends report frames this as “the AI infrastructure reckoning,” noting that the anticipated transition from compute expansion toward efficiency-focused orchestration results from a convergence of technological, economic, and organisational drivers. Capital constraints have reduced appetite for expansion without demonstrated returns, and organisations observing 50 to 70 per cent GPU underutilisation recognise that expansion compounds inefficiency. But orchestration still requires instruments to orchestrate. And the instruments, in this case orbital satellites, launch vehicles, terrestrial data centres, and global communication networks, are concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.

The Council on Foreign Relations, assessing how 2026 could decide the future of artificial intelligence, observed that “diffusion could be even more important than cutting-edge innovation” but acknowledged it is “harder to measure.” This distinction matters: innovation creates capability, but diffusion, the spread of that capability through infrastructure, determines who benefits from it. An entity that controls both the innovation layer and the diffusion layer holds a position that purely algorithmic competitors simply cannot match.

Whether this concentration proves beneficial or dangerous depends entirely on governance structures that do not yet exist. The regulatory frameworks designed for terrestrial telecommunications and antitrust were not built for entities that simultaneously manufacture rockets, operate global satellite networks, develop frontier AI models, and plan orbital data centres. The OECD has recommended that competition authorities “assess whether existing powers are sufficient to address potential abuses of dominance.” The answer, almost certainly, is that they are not.

The question that opened this article, whether the future of AI belongs to the best algorithm or the best infrastructure, is not quite right. The real question is whether we are comfortable with a world where the two become indistinguishable, where the algorithm and the infrastructure that runs it merge into a single system controlled by a single entity, and where the physics of rocket launches and orbital mechanics become as important to AI capability as the mathematics of gradient descent. That world is no longer hypothetical. It is being built, one satellite at a time, at a cadence of roughly 550 per day.

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References and Sources

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34. Global News Wire, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Satellite Internet Research Report 2026: $8.91 Bn Market Opportunities,” 29 January 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/01/29/3228392/0/en/p.html

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Jada Is Not Addicted to Porn

#nsfw #shorts

“I'm not addicted to porn,” Jada said to herself.

It was another early Saturday night. It was an ordinary night for her. She was in her home, soft music was playing. She just lit incense.

The husky smoky and sweet aroma filled her nostrils as she cupped her left breast and pinched her nipple. A low moan escaped her breath as the sensation traveled through her body.

“It's normal to touch yourself like this all day,” she thought to herself.

Jada really doesn't talk much on the weekends. She likes it that way. It's quiet. It's peaceful. She can be naked. She can be alone with her thoughts. She can touch herself.

Jada was sitting in her high end gaming chair. Fully nude with her legs spread. Her right index finger was slowly twirling her clit while another finger gently caressed her wet and open folds.

Jada's skin was a hue of smooth brown caramel. Her well planned diet and mild exercise kept her curves soft, but she was curvy in all the right ways and places. She liked her body. She looked very much like the women she saw on her screens every day. The only difference was that they had a massive following online and got paid to make pro-amateur porn.

They show their talents. They were beautifully flexible. They bravely insert dildos of size and girth that Jada only could dream about. She thinks they are so brave to be fully nude on the internet, faces showing, lets spread, presenting their womanly charms for everyone. Shameless, bold, bare, beautiful. And all of them look just like her. It felt good to see so many women that look like her feeling good all the time.

“I'm not addicted to porn,” Jada said to herself. “I just like watching them. They look so happy and free”

And Jada was right. They were happy and free. When she was in college, she would watch porn to relieve stress after hours of studying. She would steal glances on her phone just like others scrolled social media. Sometimes she would steal away to the restroom to touch herself.

Sometimes if she did really well on a test, she would hide away in her private dorm and masturbate for up to 8 hours or more for a job well done. Porn was her reward for everything she did. She's not addicted to porn because she still got good grades. She was succeeding. It wasn't a hindrance. It was empowerment. Porn was her reward.

“Porn addicts can't function without porn. They need it. I can stop any time I want. They can't hold a job like I can. They can't become a manager. They would be too busy masturbating to try to do anything productive.”

Jada rubbed her clit furiously at the idea of being so addicted to porn she can't function. The idea turns her on like nothing else. Right when she was about to cum, she stopped. “Not yet, I have more porn to watch. I need to keep going. It's ok to keep going.”

When Jada graduated, she nailed an entry level position right away. She proved her worth right away. She got glowing reviews, She got along well with her colleges, she even earned enough money to get her first apartment. That's when things escalated.

“Now that I'm on my own, I can do what I want. I have a good job, I have money in the bank. I should reward myself. I need to make my goon sessions better. I deserve it.”

After a year of steady paychecks and good reviews she got an offer to be a manager in her company. Her signing bonus was confirmation that using porn as her reward system was paying off.

So she decided to invest in her future. Jada built her ultimate goon station.

She bought a large wide desk, a high-end tower pc with massive storage, 4 monitors, and a comfortable chair. Of course she had a bed and a TV, but that's not where the action is. Her bed was small and humble, just big enough for her. Just enough to be comfortable while she scrolled porn until she fell asleep. Her couch was ok, she often played porn casually while she was eating her meals, but she just needed more screens.

One was never enough though. Sometimes, she would put her laptop on the coffee table and play porn too, but it wasn't the same. That's why she built her goon station. Her four 30 inch screens were the center of her world. They were her entertainment, her friends, her connection to all the good things in the world.

All the good things in the world are porn.

“I'm normal I can multitask. This is not an addiction.” Jada picked up her dildo and slid it slowly inside of herself savoring the moment. Years of planned control and patience has taught her how to edge for hours on end.

“Orgasms are too short, they are over too soon. Edging is better. Gooning is better. This is not porn addiction, this is a lifestyle”

And with that, Jada sat naked in her chair, edging, leaking a small puddle into the seat. Soft moans of pleasure surrounded her, filled her mind, her ears. It was the weekend after all. Young ladies in their late 20s spend all their time gooning to screens lost in pleasure. Hours passed by as she sank deeper.

Jada is normal in every way.