Space startup Aetherflux says it plans to put its first data center satellite into orbit during the first quarter of 2027.
The company, founded and run by Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of financial firm Robinhood, sees satellites as a time-saving alternative to terrestrial data center construction, which can take five or more years.
"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy," said Bhatt in a statement. "The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won't get us there fast enough."
Amid the baffling absence of funding constraints, efforts to scale artificial intelligence remain gated by the availability of data center capacity and energy. Mundane concerns like land acquisition, utility connections, and creating sturdy structures can be bypassed for the cost of lifting kit beyond the Kármán line.
The cost to launch 1 kg on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy comes to about $1,400, according to recent estimates. Per Google's calculations, if launch costs drop to around $200 per kg, as projected by 2030, the outlay required to set up and run space-based data centers would be comparable to ground-based operations.
Bhatt calls the satellite constellation project "Galactic Brain," though the solar-powered data satellites won't have such a vast remit – they'll just be orbiting the Earth alongside a growing number of other objects.
Aetherflux joins Orbits Edge and Starcloud, not to mention Google and Nvidia, as companies with ambitions to put data centers in space, the final (minimally regulated) frontier now that data centers have been sunk into the ocean and buried underground.
Bhatt's biz was founded in 2024 and scored $60 million of funding for the purpose of demonstrating the viability of beaming energy from space to Earth via infrared laser. It aims to launch a satellite capable of doing so in 2026. The company's space data center plans represent an expansion on its initial vision.
Aetherflux isn't yet ready to talk about pricing. "Our first product will focus on AI inference and general-purpose compute for customers," a company spokesperson told The Register by email. "We do not have a price point to disclose at this time."
But for a to-be-determined fee, the company aims to provide "multi-gigabit level bandwidth with nearly constant uptime."
When the company gets around to doing regular launches, it anticipates sending about 30 satellites up at a time on a SpaceX Falcon 9 or equivalent launcher. If SpaceX's Starship becomes an option, Aetherflux could orbit 100 or more datacenter sats in a single launch.
Asked about the life expectancy of its birds, given that GPUs may not last more than a few years under high utilization and radiation, Aetherflux's spokesperson said: "Our approach is to continuously launch new hardware and quickly integrate the latest architectures. Older systems will run lower priority tasks and serve out the full useful lifetime of high-end GPUs." ®
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