The New Space Race: Startups Press Ahead on ‘Orbital Infrastructure,’ Test Feasibility of Data Centers

A SpaceX rocket earlier this month carried an experimental Google satellite that will make simple requests to Gemini while researchers test how its four TPUs perform in space, and the same launch carried Cowboy Space's Reason-1 satellite, which is experimenting with beaming solar power back to Earth via laser. Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt and backed by Index Ventures' Jan Hammer among others, unveiled a purpose-built data center rocket that can carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit, and plans to sell launch services to others as "Big Iron Express." Bhatt told Newcomer the company's "north star" is making space compute cost-competitive with terrestrial compute through extreme vertical integration, while another well-funded player, Starcloud, is backed by Benchmark and valued at $2.3 billion.