Baiju Bhatt
A new design for orbital data centers. Greener cement. The sweet spot for getting enough sleep. All that and more in this week’s edition of The Prototype. To get it in your inbox, sign up here.
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.
