～As a First Step into Satellite Intelligence for Finance, Delivering Construction Activity as Alternative Data for Leading Economic Indicators～

Space Shift, Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of its “New Building Detection Data” on the Snowflake Marketplace, operated by Snowflake®. This dataset utilizes Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data and AI analysis to detect newly constructed buildings across Japan.
The data is generated by the building detection AI under “SateAIs City,” the urban development and real estate sub-brand of Space Shift’s proprietary satellite data analysis brand “SateAIs™.” This launch marks Space Shift’s first step toward expanding the application of satellite data as alternative data in the finance and investment sectors. By objectively, comprehensively, and continuously capturing the physical movements of construction activities, this service supports the early identification of urban growth and economic trends. 

Background: Construction activity is a physical, leading indicator of economic trends. 

The emergence of new buildings is a crucial signal indicating urban growth, economic activity, and infrastructure development. On the other hand, existing official statistics—such as building commencement data—are only available monthly, carry a built-in time lag before publication, and face limitations in geographical granularity. 

Space Shift is driving initiatives to deliver satellite data to financial institutions and a broad range of sectors, positioning it as a resource that captures real-world events objectively and faster than publicly available information. Following our May 2026 expansion of BI tool and generative AI assistant integrations, this marketplace launch further extends our customers’ ability to directly leverage satellite data analytics within their own operational environments. The New Building Detection Data represents the very first use case of this initiative. As a dataset that quantifies and captures construction activities on a wide scale, it is expected to drive diverse decision-making scenarios, including asset management, real estate analysis, and risk assessment. 

About the Provided Data 

By utilizing SAR satellites that do not rely on optical imagery, the New Building Detection Data achieves wide-area, consistent building detection regardless of weather conditions or time of day. Each polygon is appended with an AI-generated detection confidence score, allowing users to select the precision level that best suits their specific applications. 

Furthermore, this dataset is not a single-year snapshot; it is organized as annual time-series data capturing detection results since 2022. By analyzing multiple years side-by-side, users can quantitatively track the momentum—such as transitions, acceleration, or deceleration—of construction activities within each region, thereby enhancing its analytical value as alternative data. 

Potential Use Cases 

• Finance & Investment: Identifying high-growth development areas, quantifying regional construction trends, and serving as supplementary data for area analysis. 
• Real Estate & Urban Development: Identifying newly developed areas and analyzing regional construction trends. 
• Insurance: Tracking the increase of new assets and supporting the assessment of regional risk exposure. 
• Mapping, Infrastructure & Logistics: Identifying candidates for map updates and monitoring urban expansion status. 
• Public Sector & Research: Urban planning, regional analysis, and quantitatively evaluating disaster recovery and reconstruction progress. 

Availability on Snowflake Marketplace 

The Snowflake Marketplace is a comprehensive platform for data and applications, allowing diverse organizations to leverage external datasets and publish their own. Currently, more than 820 providers offer over 3,400 content items, including AI-ready data, agents, and integrated SaaS solutions. 

Without the need for tedious data downloads or complex ingestion processes, users can seamlessly combine and analyze this data alongside their own internal datasets directly within their Snowflake environment. By offering our data within the Snowflake ecosystem—already trusted by financial institutions and a wide array of enterprises—we deliver satellite data in a form that is easy to trial and integrate, even for users who have never utilized satellite intelligence before. 

Additionally, we provide sample SQL queries that can be executed directly within the listing, enabling users to visualize and analyze the data through BI tools such as Tableau without any prior preprocessing. 

▼ “New Building Detection Data” Listing Page (Snowflake Marketplace) 

Japan New Building Detection — SAR × AI (Annual YoY Diff)  

▼ SateAIs Product Page 

https://www.spcsft.com/service/sateais/ 

Future Outlook 

Space Shift will continuously drive initiatives to deliver satellite data as alternative data for the finance and investment sectors. In addition to construction activity data, we are currently exploring plans to provide data across diverse domains—including commodities, disasters, and macroeconomics. By expanding our integrations with financial platforms, we will further accelerate the social implementation of satellite data analytics. 

* Please also refer to our past press releases: 

• “SateAIs™” Now Supports Integrations with BI Tools and Generative AI Assistants:
  https://www.spcsft.com/news/4707/ (Japanese only)
• Building Change Extraction Solution Powered by SAR Satellite Data and AI (Promoting Digital Transformation in Mapping):
  https://www.spcsft.com/en/news-en/2864/ 
• Launch of Satellite Data Analytics Brand “SateAIs™”:
   https://www.spcsft.com/en/news-en/2721/ 

What is SateAIs? 

Under the core concept of “Empowering Operations through Satellite & AI Intelligence,” SateAIs is a comprehensive analytics brand developed by Space Shift. It systematically categorizes our proprietary satellite data analytics algorithms by specific applications and delivery formats. While satellite data analytics has historically required highly specialized expertise and posed high barriers to entry, SateAIs reorganizes this technology into purpose-specific AI packages. This allows a wide range of users—including local governments, corporations, and research institutions—to easily leverage satellite insights to solve their operational challenges. “SateAIs™ City,” the sub-brand under which this dataset is offered, specializes in driving decision-making for urban development and real estate. 

About Snowflake

Snowflake enables organizations to accelerate innovation and derive greater value from data as the platform for the AI era. More than 13,900 customers, including hundreds of the world’s largest enterprises, leverage Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, utilize, and share data, applications, and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI become a transformative force for everyone. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).

 

Media Inquiries
Space Shift Inc. (Attn: Takeuchi / Taguchi)
Inquiry Form: https://share.hsforms.com/1-fFRnQR2QwW3c-zOTCAanQ5m0z8
Email: pr@spcsft.com