source: techcrunch ai: how an e-scooter founder raised $5 million to build space data centers
level: business
orbital, a new space data center company, raised a $5 million seed round from investors including a16z's speedrun accelerator. founder euwyn poon previously started e-scooter company spin and sold it to ford. he had no space experience but worked through several ideas before landing on space data centers. the pitch is familiar: ai compute demand is high, and deploying on earth is slow, so why not use space for unlimited solar power and fewer regulations.
the main hurdle is launch costs. orbital plans to rely on spacex's starship rocket to become commercially available, as current falcon 9 prices make the business unfeasible. for now, the company is building a demo to test radiation shielding and thermal management with an nvidia blackwell chip on a partner's satellite. by 2028, it aims to launch its first data-processing spacecraft using nvidia's space-1 gpus, doing piece-wise inference work to generate revenue with each satellite.
orbital's goal is a constellation of 10,000 satellites providing a distributed gigawatt of computing power, with each satellite at 100 kw. competitors like starcloud already have gpus in orbit, and some startups are even building their own rockets. poon believes the breadth of ai demand allows many companies to succeed, citing different workloads and designs. investor andrew chen noted that poon's experience scaling spin across 100 cities shows he can manage the complex task of building an aerospace company, and that venture firms are now more comfortable with long-term, capital-intensive space projects.
why it matters: space data centers could expand ai compute capacity beyond earth's limits, but their feasibility depends on cheaper launch costs and reliable hardware in orbit.
source: techcrunch ai: how an e-scooter founder raised $5 million to build space data centers