"Amid the baffling absence of funding constraints, efforts to scale artificial intelligence remain gated by 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 Kármán line. The cost to launch 1 kg on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy comes to about $1,400, according to recent estimates. Per Google's 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."
"Aetherflux joins Orbits Edge and Starcloud, not to mention Google and Nvidia, as companies with ambitions to put data centers in space, the final (minimally regulated) frontier now that data centers have been sunk into the ocean and buried underground. Bhatt's biz was founded in 2024 and 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 race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy," said Bhatt in a statement. "The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won't get us there fast enough.""
Aetherflux plans to put a solar-powered data center satellite into orbit in the first quarter of 2027 to avoid five-plus-year terrestrial data center build times. Founder Baiju Bhatt frames the artificial general intelligence race as one for compute and energy, arguing current energy plans are too slow. Space deployment sidesteps land acquisition, utility hookups, and heavy structures, though launch cost remains critical: Falcon Heavy is about $1,400/kg today and Google projects ~$200/kg by 2030, at which point space-based data centers could be cost-comparable to ground facilities. The company raised $60 million in 2024 and aims to demonstrate infrared laser beamed energy with a 2026 satellite.
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