This simply is not true! NASA and IBM need to do further literature review and rely less on press releases.

There are larger foundation models for geospatial imagery available. Our pre-training method, Scale-MAE [0], has 323M parameters, makes encoders robust to changes in satellite imagery resolution, and is therefore trained on satellite imagery of all resolutions. Work out of SI Analytics [1] presents a 2.4B parameter transformers for satellite imagery.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14532

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05215