Space startup Aetherflux says it plans to put its first data center satellite into orbit during the first quarter of 2027.

The company, founded and run by Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of financial firm Robinhood, sees satellites as a time-saving alternative to terrestrial data center construction, which can take five or more years.

"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy," said Bhatt in [1]a statement . "The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won't get us there fast enough."

[2]

Amid the baffling absence of funding constraints, efforts to scale artificial intelligence remain gated by [3]the availability of data center capacity and energy . Mundane concerns like land acquisition, utility connections, and creating sturdy structures can be bypassed for the cost of lifting kit beyond the [4]Kármán line .

[5]

[6]

The cost to launch 1 kg on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy comes to about $1,400, according to [7]recent [8]estimates . Per Google's [9]calculations , if launch costs drop to around $200 per kg, as projected by 2030, the outlay required to set up and run space-based data centers would be comparable to ground-based operations.

Bhatt calls the satellite constellation project "Galactic Brain," though the solar-powered data satellites won't have such a vast remit – they'll just be orbiting the Earth [10]alongside a growing number of other objects .

[11]IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

[12]Letting Nvidia sell H200s to China is closing the door after the horse has bolted

[13]Linux Foundation aims to become the Switzerland of AI agents

[14]Google's AI training tactics land it in another EU antitrust fight

[15]Aetherflux joins [16]Orbits Edge and [17]Starcloud , not to mention [18]Google and [19]Nvidia , as companies with [20]ambitions to put data centers in space , the final (minimally regulated) frontier now that data centers have been [21]sunk into the ocean and [22]buried underground .

Bhatt's biz was founded in 2024 and [23]scored $60 million of funding for the purpose of demonstrating the viability of beaming energy from space to Earth via infrared laser. It aims to launch a satellite capable of doing so in 2026. The company's space data center plans represent an expansion on its initial vision.

[24]

Aetherflux isn't yet ready to talk about pricing. "Our first product will focus on AI inference general-purpose compute for customers," a company spokesperson told The Register by email. "We do not have a price point to disclose at this time."

But for a to-be-determined fee, the company aims to provide "multi-gigabit level bandwidth with nearly constant uptime."

When the company gets around to doing regular launches, it anticipates sending about 30 satellites up at a time on a SpaceX Falcon 9 or equivalent launcher. If SpaceX's Starship becomes an option, Aetherflux could orbit 100 or more datacenter sats in a single launch.

[25]

Asked about the life expectancy of its birds, given that GPUs may not last more than a few years under high utilization and radiation, Aetherflux's spokesperson said: "Our approach is to continuously launch new hardware and quickly integrate the latest architectures. Older systems will run lower priority tasks and serve out the full useful lifetime of high-end GPUs." ®

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[1] https://aetherflux.medium.com/aetherflux-announces-orbital-data-center-targets-q1-2027-dc813d3e2387

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/futureofthedatacenter&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aTlS2NvdRsTR1ZG7VkWjeQAAAFE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/04/gartner_datacenter_power_emerging_technologies/

[4] https://acrosskarman.wilsoncenter.org/across-karman-faq

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/futureofthedatacenter&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aTlS2NvdRsTR1ZG7VkWjeQAAAFE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

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[7] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/01/spacex-starship-roadmap-to-100-times-lower-cost-launch.html

[8] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit

[9] https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/24/scientists_fcc_tests_satellite_impact/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/ibm_riyadh_air/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/nvidia_h200s_china_ai/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/linux_foundation_agentic_ai_foundation/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/eu_google_ai_antitrust/

[15] https://www.aetherflux.com/

[16] https://orbitsedge.com/

[17] https://www.starcloud.com/

[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/04/google_takes_ai_aspirations_orbital/

[19] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/

[20] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/orbital_datacenters_subject_to_all/

[21] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-powers-ai-boom-with-undersea-data-centers/

[22] https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/top-10-underground-data-centres

[23] https://aetherflux.medium.com/aetherflux-raises-50-million-to-deliver-energy-to-planet-earth-b5a6859cb0ce

[24] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/futureofthedatacenter&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aTlS2NvdRsTR1ZG7VkWjeQAAAFE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[25] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/futureofthedatacenter&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aTlS2NvdRsTR1ZG7VkWjeQAAAFE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[26] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/