Aetherflux Announces First Orbital Data Center for AI, Targeting Q1 2027 Launch
December 16, 2025
The race to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) is increasingly constrained by the availability of power and the lengthy timelines for constructing terrestrial data centers. In a bold move to circumvent these bottlenecks, space energy startup Aetherflux has announced that its first orbital data center, dubbed "Galactic Brain," is slated to become commercially operational by the first quarter of 2027.
The company, founded in October 2024 by Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, aims to leverage the abundant solar energy available in space to power high-density computing. Aetherflux argues that the traditional path of securing land, utility connections, and constructing a ground-based data center can take five to eight years—a timeline it claims to bypass by deploying its infrastructure in low Earth orbit (LEO). "The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy. The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won't get us there fast enough," said Bhatt. "Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely."
The project is part of Aetherflux's broader ambition to build a space-based solar power (SBSP) constellation. The first data center "node" or satellite, described as a modest design by today's standards integrating computing hardware with solar panels, is expected to launch in 2026 following the deployment of its initial SBSP satellite. The company has secured significant funding to pursue this vision, having raised $60 million to date, including a $50 million Series A round earlier this year from notable investors such as Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
This announcement taps into a growing speculative trend within the space and tech sectors, recently amplified by public figures like Jeff Bezos, who predicted gigawatt-scale computing in space within two decades. While the economic viability of orbital data centers remains a subject of debate, Aetherflux's plan represents a significant step in testing the premise that moving critical digital infrastructure off-planet could solve pressing energy and logistical challenges on Earth, particularly for the insatiable compute demands of advanced AI.
Source: datacenterdynamics
