Orbital Raises $5 Million to Join the Orbital Data Center Race
June 10, 2026
Orbital Raises $5 Million to Join the Orbital Data Center Race
A Los Angeles-based startup has raised $5 million to fund an in-orbit computing demonstration next year, joining a growing race to deploy orbital data centers that could meet surging demand for AI infrastructure. Founded earlier this year by electric scooter entrepreneur Euwyn Poon, Orbital announced on June 9 that the pre-seed funds will also support initial work on its first purpose-built orbital compute satellite, Orbital-1, which is slated for launch in 2028.
Orbital’s vision involves deploying more than 100,000 satellites, delivering over 10 gigawatts of computing power. Poon, who sold his e-scooter company Spin to Ford a year after its founding in 2017, said each production satellite would be capable of 100 kilowatts (kW) of compute power for AI workloads. “For perspective, the highest-power commercial satellites flown to date generate only 20-30 kW,” Poon noted, “and the only spacecraft ever in the 100 kW class is the ISS, a crewed station assembled over decades. 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, or the radiator area needed to support a 100 kW orbital compute node.
Orbital enters a competitive field that includes Starcloud, a Redmond, Washington-based startup that has raised about $200 million to date for a proposed constellation of 88,000 orbital data centers. Founded in 2024, Starcloud is designing a three-ton, 200 kW-class spacecraft that it expects SpaceX’s Starship to be ready to launch 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. Poon acknowledged that Orbital’s ambitious scale “requires a massive amount of launch capacity,” but added that it “scales with the next generation of heavy-lift vehicles. We get there incrementally.”
SpaceX itself has plans for up to a million orbital data centers, building 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 said yesterday that its first-generation AI1 orbital data center would have around 150 kW peak and 120 kW of sustained power. Musk stated that the company expects to be operating an orbital data center production facility “at some reasonable volume by the end of next year.”
Orbital’s 2027 pathfinder mission, slated to launch on a Falcon 9 rideshare, 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 roles.
The pre-seed funding was led by a16z’s startup accelerator program Speedrun, with support from early-stage investors including Basis Set, Human Element, Wayfinder, Antler, Anti Fund, Ascent, Rubik, Zero Knowledge Ventures, LYVC, Feld Ventures, New Legacy, FNDR, UpHonest, and Asterisk. The race to deploy orbital data centers reflects a broader industry push to locate AI computing infrastructure in space, where continuous solar power and low-latency global connectivity could offer advantages over terrestrial data centers, though significant technical and logistical hurdles remain.
Source: spacenews
