Orbital, a Los Angeles startup barely five months old, has asked U.S. regulators for permission to loft up to 100,000 data center satellites into low Earth orbit, an audacious bid to run artificial intelligence workloads on solar power beamed straight from space.
A 100,000-satellite ambition
In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission on June 24, Orbital laid out plans for a constellation of 100-kilowatt-class spacecraft flying at altitudes of 500 to 850 kilometers. Each satellite would stretch roughly 100 meters across with its solar arrays and radiators, weigh between 1.5 and 2.5 metric tons, and carry clusters of NVIDIA-powered servers. Fully deployed, the company says the fleet could deliver as much as 10 gigawatts of computing power.
The pitch rests on a simple physical argument: in orbit, sunlight is nearly constant and heat can be radiated directly into the vacuum of space, sidestepping the electricity and cooling bottlenecks that increasingly constrain data centers on the ground.
An e-scooter founder reaches for orbit
Orbital emerged from stealth with a $5 million pre-seed round after graduating from Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun accelerator. It is led by founder Euwyn Poon, a Cornell-trained engineer and lawyer who previously built micromobility company Spin before selling it to Ford. His roughly six-person team draws on veterans of SpaceX, Amazon and Northrop Grumman.
Joining a crowded orbital race
Orbital is far from alone in chasing compute above the atmosphere. The move echoes a wave of space-based data center efforts, from Cowboy Space's $275M Series B to launch AI data centers into orbit to Muon Space's Condor-Ultra Starship-class bus. Even heavyweight players are circling the concept, underscored by Rocket Lab's $8 billion move to buy Iridium as space infrastructure consolidates.
A long road to first light
The company is preparing a demonstration mission, with its first dedicated compute satellite, Orbital-1, slated for 2027 and a full commercial constellation years beyond that. Skeptics note the launch mass and economics remain daunting, and an FCC filing is only the first regulatory step. Still, Orbital's plan lands amid soaring appetite for AI infrastructure that shows no sign of cooling.
Reporting based on coverage from SpaceNews, TechCrunch, DatacenterDynamics and Daily Galaxy.