TechCrunch Desktop Logo TechCrunch Mobile Logo LatestStartupsVentureAppleSecurityAIAppsDisrupt 2026 EventsPodcastsNewsletters SearchSubmit Site Search Toggle Mega Menu Toggle Topics Latest AI Amazon Apps Biotech & Health Climate Cloud Computing Commerce Crypto Enterprise EVs Fintech Fundraising Gadgets Gaming Google Government & Policy Hardware Instagram Layoffs Media & Entertainment Meta Microsoft Privacy Robotics Security Social Space Startups TikTok Transportation Venture More from TechCrunch Staff Events Startup Battlefield StrictlyVC Newsletters Podcasts Videos Partner Content TechCrunch Brand Studio Contact Us Image Credits:Cowboy Space Company / Cowboy Space Company AI There aren’t enough rockets for space data centers — Cowboy Space raised $275M to build them Tim Fernholz 6:00 AM PDT · May 11, 2026 The apparently insatiable demand for AI compute has data center entrepreneurs looking to the stars. There’s a key problem: There aren’t enough rockets to put data centers in orbit around Earth, and they’re too expensive. Most of the players are hoping that SpaceX’s Starship — expected to make its 12th test flight as soon as this weekend — will solve the problem.
But once the vehicle is operational, it may be years before it is commercially available, given SpaceX’s internal satellite business. The same is true for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which failed to deliver a satellite during its third launch in April. That leaves space data center schemes either targeting the mid-2030s, like Google’s Suncatcher, or preparing to start off doing edge processing tasks for space sensors, like Starcloud.
In theory, there’s a third way: “We’re standing up our own rocket program,” Baiju Bhatt, the CEO and founder of Cowboy Space Corporation, told TechCrunch. He expects the first launch before the end of 2028. Today, the company announced the closure of a $275 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $2 billion, led by earlier backer Index Ventures, as a down payment on that work.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC also participated. The company had previously raised $80 million from investors, including Index, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and New Enterprise Associates. Bhatt, a co-founder of online stock platform Robinhood, launched this startup in 2024 as Aetherflux, with plans to collect abundant solar energy in space and beam it down to Earth.
The idea of space data centers led the company to pivot toward using its electricity while in orbit. The practical realities of that effort, in turn, led him to a rocket development program, and the company’s new name. Bhatt said he spoke to multiple launch providers to try and find a path where his company would build only satellites, but he couldn’t find enough launch capacity to truly scale an orbital data center business, or do so in a way where the unit economics could compete with terrestrial alternatives. var playerInstance_jwplayer_6a7c6e666fbb2 = jwplayer( "jwplayer_6a7c6e666fbb2" ); playerInstance_jwplayer_6a7c6e666fbb2.setup(); “There’s a lot of new rockets that are coming online, but as we look three, four years out, it’s still very, very scarce, and I think that you’re going to see a lot of the first-party rocket providers actually specialize into their own payloads,” Bhatt said.
Of course, while bringing the rocket in-house is logical, it’s also nuts. Only a handful of private companies in the West, mainly SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Arianespace, are consistently launching commercial rockets. Two others, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, have been struggling to drag their vehicles out of development hell for years.
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