Cowboy Space Raises $275 Million to Build Solar-Powered Orbital Data Center

Cowboy Space Corp. has raised $275 million in Series B funding to build orbital AI data centers, marking a major expansion for the space infrastructure company founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt.

The round was led by Index Ventures, along with new investors IVP, Blossom Capital and SAIC, along with existing backers Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Interlagos and Bhatt.

In the year The company, founded in 2024 and formerly known as Aetherflux, has announced its new name and brand.

Cowboy Space is deploying a vertically integrated system to move and process AI computations in orbit. The company builds low-Earth-orbit satellites that use solar energy, a purpose-built launch vehicle, and payloads designed for the space environment.

The main idea is to make the rocket's upper stage and data center payload part of a single vehicle. Instead of launching a separate payload and discarding the upper stage, Cowboy plans to keep each upper stage in orbit and serve as a 1 megawatt data center.

Cowboy is working with NVIDIA to deploy NVIDIA Space 1 Vera Rubin Modules, bringing advanced AI hardware into Low Earth Orbit. The company says the system is designed to reduce repeater weight and improve the amount of power and computation delivered to orbit.

Bhatt said Cowboy's design began with the unique requirements of orbital data centers rather than adapting terrestrial systems for space. They described the rocket and the data center as a single design from the first day, which he called the first principles from the traditional constellation model.

The increase comes as demand for AI continues to strain land power and data center capacity. According to Index Ventures partner Jan Hamer, Cowboy is growing as the demand for AI computing increases and labor starts to exceed what the current infrastructure can support.

Cowboy plans to launch the first satellite later this year to demonstrate the location of the Earth's energy beam. The company's team includes engineers from SpaceX, Astranis, NASA, Kuiper and NVIDIA.

The company is entering a technically difficult but crowded race to move its AI infrastructure above ground. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Aetherflux was raising new financing at a valuation of $2 billion, and that rivals including SpaceX and Blue Origin were also exploring orbital AI data centers.