Orbital, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator and led by e-scooter mogul Euwyn Poon, has raised $5 million for space-based data centers. With SpaceX’s Starship expected to bring costs down, Orbital plans to launch its first satellite in 2028, equipped with Nvidia GPUs.

The demand for AI compute is insatiable, and space offers endless sunshine and a reduced regulatory burden. But the economics of launch remain prohibitive: until rockets like Starship come online, the business case isn’t economically feasible.

In parallel, competitors like Cowboy Space Company are building their own rockets, while Blue Origin is eyeing its New Glenn launch vehicle for data center deployment. Poon believes there’s enough AI demand to support multiple players, and he hopes to deploy 10,000 satellites providing a distributed gigawatt of computing power by 2028.

“This kind of thing would have sounded crazy 10 years ago,” says Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen. “Starting it in 2026 taps into the excitement of capital markets.”