Baiju Bhatt, billionaire cofounder of retail brokerage Robinhood, started his company Aetherflux in 2024 to use solar panels in space to collect sunlight and beam that energy back down to Earth to use as electricity.

Now, he’s expanded that vision to the somewhat far-fetched idea of building data centers in space. Why not capture the sun’s energy and use it instead to fuel power-hungry server racks stationed in orbit? “This year, the light bulb went off that we're living in an idiosyncratic time where energy needs for humanity are inflecting in a way that’s unprecedented,” Bhatt said.

In December, Aetherflux announced it will send its first satellite with AI chips to space by early 2027, a project dubbed Galactic Brain. And Bhatt is not the only tech billionaire thinking the same thing. A month after former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took a controlling interest in aerospace manufacturer Relativity Space and became its CEO in March, he confirmed that he bought the company to build data centers in orbit. In November, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Project Suncatcher, which plans to launch two prototype satellites carrying tensor processing units, Google’s AI chips, to power the company’s AI model Gemini by early 2027. This month, the Wall Street Journal

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