How an e‑scooter founder raised $5M for orbital data centers

Friends, I’d like to share news from the world of space data centers and AI. Startup Orbital has raised $5M (a16z Speedrun and others) to perform inference in orbit.

In brief:
- Founder Euwyn Poon — previously founded Spin — is preparing a demo flight carrying an Nvidia Blackwell chip to test shielding and thermal management.
- The company expects to commercialize once Starship achieves routine flights; Falcon 9 makes the model economically unviable.
- Long‑term goal: deploy 10,000 satellites to deliver distributed gigawatts of compute.

Why it matters: the model could alleviate AI compute shortages but depends on lower launch costs and sustained long‑term capital.

Do you think this roadmap is realistic?

#space #AI #infrastructure #startups