Orbital raises $5 million to join orbital data center race
TAMPA, Fla. - A Los Angeles-based startup has raised $5 million to fund an in-orbit computing demonstration next year, ahead of plans to deploy more than 100,000 orbital data centers to meet surging demand for AI infrastructure.
Orbital, founded earlier this year by electric scooter entrepreneur Euwyn Poon, said June 9 that the pre-seed funds will also support initial work on its first purpose-built orbital compute satellite, Orbital-1, slated for 2028.
According to Poon, who sold his e-scooter company Spin to Ford a year after it was founded in 2017, each production satellite would be capable of 100 kilowatts (kW) of compute power for AI workloads.
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"For perspective, the highest-power commercial satellites flown to date generate only 20-30 kW," Poon said, "and the only spacecraft ever in the 100 kW class is the ISS, a crewed station assembled over decades.
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"We're targeting that in a single, mass-manufacturable satellite."
The startup has not disclosed specific engineering details such as spacecraft mass, solar array size and the radiator area needed to support a 100 kW orbital compute node.
Starcloud, a Redmond, Washington-based startup that has raised about $200 million to date for a proposed constellation of 88,000 orbital data centers, is among those also looking to distribute computing power across multiple satellites in low Earth orbit.
Founded in 2024, Starcloud is designing a three-ton, 200 kW-class spacecraft that it expects SpaceX's Starship to be ready to begin launching before the end of 2028. In the meantime, Starcloud plans to use Falcon 9 rockets to deploy smaller-scale computing payloads to serve cloud, edge computing and hosted payload customers.
Orbital's vision for more than 100,000 satellites, delivering over 10 gigawatts of computing power, "requires a massive amount of launch capacity," Poon conceded, but "scales with the next generation of heavy-lift vehicles. We get there incrementally."
SpaceX, meanwhile, has plans for up to a million orbital data centers that would build on the solar, intersatellite laser link and manufacturing capabilities developed for its Starlink broadband network.
With a 70-meter wingspan and a deployed height of 20 meters, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk yesterday said its first-generation AI1 orbital data center would have around 150 kW peak and 120 kW of sustained power. Musk said the company expects to be operating an orbital data center production facility "at some reasonable volume by the end of next year."
Watch @ElonMusk provide a technical update on SpaceX's capability to manufacture, launch, and operate AI satellites at scale → https://t.co/PSCyWrNsOg pic.twitter.com/vhtr46uax7
Orbital's 2027 pathfinder, slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission, aims to test core challenges facing this emerging market: GPU operation, radiation tolerance, thermal performance and data downlink in orbit.
The startup said later spacecraft would be designed around NVIDIA's Space-1 Vera Rubin-class GPU architecture.
While Poon has no space experience, he said he is assembling a team of experts to help develop the technology at Factory-1, a satellite assembly and testing facility in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.
"Our engineering team brings hands-on experience from the companies that have actually built and flown spacecraft at scale - SpaceX, Amazon Leo, Vast, Northrop Grumman, and Millennium Space Systems," he said without elaborating.
The startup's website lists open positions for engineers across thermal and power, mechanical and structural, electrical and manufacturing.
The pre-seed funding was led by a16z's startup accelerator program Speedrun, supported by early-stage investors Basis Set, Human Element, Wayfinder, Antler, Anti Fund, Ascent, Rubik, Zero Knowledge Ventures, LYVC, Feld Ventures, New Legacy, FNDR, UpHonest and Asterisk.
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