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As America’s tech companies try to build infrastructure to keep up with the demand for AI, so follows the backlash from communities over concerns about water use and energy costs, especially as the price of electricity continues to climb. That’s why, as we’ve discussed a lot here, companies are increasingly looking to space as a solution. Google and SpaceX made headlines this week on word of a potential collaboration to build orbital data centers.

Another company entered the fray this week. That’s Cowboy Space Corporation (formerly known as Aetherflux), which this week raised $275 million at a $2 billion valuation with its own plan to build space-based data centers–20,000 of them, according to an FCC filing. Cowboy was founded by CEO Baiju Bhatt, who previously cofounded fintech company Robinhood. He told me what makes building these facilities in orbit attractive is long lead times and resource demands of installing them on Earth. “Space offers an abundance to solve this problem,” he said.

The biggest source of abundance? Energy. Bhatt said Cowboy will be launching its satellites into specific orbits that will keep the Sun shining on them 24/7, enabling them to get maximal power, as though “they were in the Sahara at lunchtime.” Another key differentiation for Cowboy is that they don’t design satellites within the standard confines of typical launch providers, its spacecraft will be purpose-built for data centers–which will be housed in the upper-stage of the rocket itself rather than being a separate satellite. Bhatt says this eliminates redundancies and will simplify design by letting the company start from scratch rather than try to fit into existing architectures. (This isn’t a new idea–the world’s first space station, Skylab, was built into the upper stage of a rocket.)

Using Earth’s orbit rather than Earth as a data center destination does pose significant challenges from both an economics and physics perspective, as I’ve covered before. But Bhatt believes many of those can be overcome with Cowboy’s plan to use the upper stage of its rocket to house 1 MW worth of chips, rather than distributing compute among many satellites as other companies plan to do.

“There are several advantages to reusing the upper stage and as much of the onboard hardware as possible for a data center, including mass savings–which can reduce launch costs–and larger operational volumes for computing equipment,” Nikoloas Gatsonis, an aerospace engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute told me via email. But with the scale comes challenges, he added, namely in dissipating the massive amounts of heat generated by the GPUs so they don’t damage the circuits.

George Lordos, a research........

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