Aetherflux bets orbital data centers beat Earth's limits — then builds its own rockets

Cowboy Space Corporation (formerly Aetherflux), founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt in 2024, builds solar-powered AI data center satellites for low Earth orbit and the rockets to launch them.

Cowboy Space bet AI compute belongs in orbit, powered by its own solar satellites and launched by its own rocket — a single integrated design.

$275M Series B at $2B post-money (May 2026) led by Index Ventures, plus roughly $80M raised earlier — about $355M in outside funding (TechCrunch; SiliconANGLE).

Bhatt, who co-founded Robinhood, started the company in 2024 as Aetherflux to collect solar power in space and beam it to Earth. The orbital data-center idea led him to use that electricity in orbit instead, and the lack of available launch capacity pushed him one step further: build the rocket too.

On May 11, 2026, the company announced the $275M Series B and the Cowboy Space rebrand, with plans to deploy 'Stampede' solar-powered LEO data center satellites using NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin modules, launch its first satellite later in 2026 to demonstrate space-to-Earth power beaming, and fly its first 1-megawatt data center on its own rocket before the end of 2028. It hired ex-SpaceX launch director Tyler Grinnell and ex-Blue Origin propulsion engineer Warren Lamont.

As of May 2026, Cowboy Space had no satellite in orbit and no rocket flying — the plan is a first demo satellite in 2026, a computing payload demonstration in 2027 and the first proprietary rocket launch by the end of 2028, with investors paying a $2B valuation for the bet (TechCrunch; SatelliteToday).

Orbital solar panels far outproduce ground ones, but Aetherflux's original beam-to-Earth plan lost too much in transmission — using the power in orbit sidesteps that (TechCrunch).

No launch provider has the capacity to scale an orbital data center business — Starship and New Glenn are years from commercial reliability — so Bhatt started his own rocket program (TechCrunch).

Building the data center into the second stage makes rocket and payload one 20,000-25,000 kg, 1 MW vehicle with about 800 GPUs — a simplification no satellite-plus-rocket pairing offers (TechCrunch).

Index Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a16z and NEA paid a $2B valuation before any flight hardware existed — capital betting on the AI-in-orbit thesis, not milestones (SiliconANGLE).

When the constraint is upstream of your product, own it: Cowboy found no launch provider with enough capacity for orbital data centers, so vertical integration became the moat instead of an option.

After the May 11, 2026 announcement, Cowboy Space said its solar-powered LEO constellation, called 'Stampede,' will use NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin modules, and its first satellite launch later in 2026 will demonstrate beaming power from space to Earth. No flight hardware had been launched and no engine had been publicly static-fired as of early June 2026; the company was hiring launch and propulsion veterans from SpaceX and Blue Origin while working through testing, manufacturing and launch-site needs.