Communication from space is a big constraint.

An AI chip could analyze and compress sensor data locally. It's also could be used for DSP for the communication algorithm.

Comms and control; signal corruption and delay will increase as the distance increases.

For comms, that means either more transmission power from a spacecraft that is likely to have been travelling for years, if not decades. Bigger ground or space-based receivers. Or much, much more cost-effectively, reducing bandwidth by adding more bits in error correction. QED using ai to transmit only interesting information becomes attractive.

While for control, it takes between five to twenty minutes for a signal between Earth and Mars, and between Earth and Voyager 1, it's currently twenty-one hours. Adding better control and the ability to cope with more eventualities to a craft that will fly itself in poorly understood situations reduces the cost of trying to achieve a reasonable likelihood of mission success [0].

[0] The alternative being to send one - or more - simpler but still massively expensive craft to determine the missing data ahead of time (and hope it doesn't change).

For satellites doing high-res earth observation of astronomical observation, detecting noteworthy frames on-satellite to prioritize for downlink can save a lot of bandwidth. Downlink is often only possible during certain parts of orbit (unless geostationary), with long blackout periods. Being able to run a moderately big CNN le transformer to spot ships, troop movements, methane leaks etc on satellite would be worth a some extra power and weight.

A rover traversing a far away planet has numerous minutes of lag. Autonomous drive is a very helpful feature, for which AI is needed

The Discovery One spacecraft system requires quite a lot of horsepower, both for the ship but also to interact with the crew.

I think that for surveillance and defense applications, have some more sophisticated algorithms running on board can be very advantageous by reducing the bandwidth needs in the downlink.

In the event of an European generalized war with russia, having smaller, nimble data payloads being sent in the downlink is definitely a tactical advantage, as we can certainly expect that one of the first targets of the Russians would be giant, fixed tracking stations.

A surveillance satellite that could interpret images and just send something like "300 tank movement detected in the last hours starting from coordinates X,Y, direction Z, average speed W" in a slow link, able to be received by mobile stations would be great for European defense.