AI is running out of power, and out of places to put it, on Earth. A Los Angeles startup wants to solve both problems by leaving the planet.
Orbital, a space-infrastructure company building AI data centres in low Earth orbit, has raised a $5mn oversubscribed pre-seed round led by a16z speedrun, with a long list of venture investors alongside.
The money funds its first in-orbit technology demonstration, Pathfinder, which is slated to fly a hosted GPU payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare in 2027, plus early development of Orbital-1, what the company calls its first purpose-built compute satellite. Its founder and chief executive, Euwyn Poon, previously co-founded the e-scooter company Spin.
The pitch starts with a real and worsening problem. The International Energy Agency expects global data-centre electricity use to more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, roughly the annual consumption of Japan, while on the ground, strained grids, cooling, land, and permitting have all become bottlenecks on new builds.
Orbital’s answer is to put the computers where those constraints loosen: in orbit, solar power is continuous in the right orbit, and waste heat radiates into the void rather than needing water and fans.
