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An unusual $300M deal aims to fund orbital computing

Illustration: Sophia Space satellites lined up in orbit
An artist’s conception shows several Sophia Space satellites in orbit. (Sophia Space Illustration)

Sophia Space and SLI, an aerospace leasing venture based in Washington, D.C., say they’ve agreed on a $300 million asset-financing framework that will support the creation of a 10-satellite constellation for high-performance computing.

The details of the arrangement are as notable as the bottom line: Sophia Space will build the satellites, leveraging the startup’s patented TILE technology for modular in-space data processing. SLI will purchase the satellites under the terms of a financing agreement.

“SLI as the lessor will purchase the satellites from Sophia, hold title to the assets, and lease them to the end user on a long-term basis in exchange for fixed monthly or quarterly payments,” Max Yergan, the company’s senior vice president for investments, explained in an email. “Full control and operational responsibility for the assets sit with Sophia and the end user, who will determine between them how operations are handled.”

Sophia’s satellites are designed to deliver on-orbit edge data services for a wide variety of applications.

“The demand we are underwriting exists today,” Yergan said. “Earth observation, weather and supply-chain analytics, disaster response and defense ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] users all face the same constraint now: They collect far more data than they can bring to the ground, and its value decays while it waits to be downlinked. Processing on orbit addresses that directly.”

The constellation’s first launch is targeted for as early as 2028. SLI would pay out funds linked to development and launch milestones, all the way through verification that the on-orbit network performs to pre-agreed standards.

The arrangement is laid out in a non-binding letter of support. “The non-binding nature is a reflection of where we are in the process, and is typical of large asset financings,” Yergan explained. “It sets the commercial framework so both parties can commit resources while definitive documentation is negotiated.”

Leasing arrangements are often seen in aviation and the maritime industry, but this is a relatively new concept for satellite ventures.

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Cowboy Space to build data centers in the Seattle area

Illustration: Cowboy Space data center satellite in orbit
An artist’s conception shows one of Cowboy Space’s data centers in Earth orbit. (Cowboy Space via LinkedIn)

California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.

“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.

The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.

Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.

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Starcloud raises $250M more for orbital data centers

Illustration showing Earth's disk with a satellite circling over it
Nvidia’s next-generation AI chip, the Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, is set to be used on Starcloud’s future satellites. (Nvidia Illustration)

Starcloud says it has raised $250 million in new funding to support the creation of a constellation of data center satellites powered by Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips.

The Series A extension funding round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors including Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX and 776. Among the new investors joining for this round are Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital and Standard Capital.

Founded in 2024, Starcloud is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., and is building production lines for its Starcloud-3 spacecraft at a new 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Wash. The newly announced round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $450 million, with a post-money valuation of $2.3 billion.

Nvidia’s participation in the funding round brings Starcloud’s collaboration with the computer-chip titan to a new level. In November 2025, Starcloud flew Nvidia’s H100 GPU to orbit for the first time. It used the chip to train a large language model called NanoGPT — marking a milestone in space-based AI data processing.

Starcloud plans to equip future satellites with Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, which Nvidia says will deliver 25 times as much in-space compute capability as the H100. Starcloud’s satellites will serve as an early flight platform for the space-rated chips.

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Sophia Space wins a patent for cool orbital data centers

Illustration: Data center satellite in orbit
An artist’s conception shows a data center satellite that makes use of Sophia Space’s tile-based architecture. (Sophia Space Illustration)

Sophia Space has secured a patent for a technology that could pave the way for solar-powered orbital data centers that passively radiate excess heat into space.

Developed in partnership with Caltech, Sophia’s architecture tackles a major hurdle in orbital computing: how to cool thousands of chips running artificial intelligence applications in space.

Traditional designs rely on satellite-wide radiator systems with heat pumps and circulating fluids. In contrast, Sophia plans to build flat, modular tiles equipped with four processors each. The tiles draw power from solar cells on their sunlit side, and shed heat into the cold vacuum of space from their dark side.

This approach avoids having to put a cooling system in the central bus of every satellite, said Leon Alkalai, Sophia Space’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer. “I think you will find in time that our approach is much more favorable when we scale to larger wattage systems, because bringing everything into a bus can only be done until a certain level, and then it becomes almost impossible to do,” he told me. “Our benefit is really scalability.”

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Rubin Observatory team discovers 11,000 new asteroids

Visualization of asteroids discovered by Rubin Observatory in the inner solar system
A model of the inner solar system shows asteroids discovered by the Rubin Observatory in light teal. Previously known asteroids are dark blue. The model highlights almost 12,700 asteroids that the Rubin team has discovered over the course of a year and a half. (Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / AURA / R. Proctor. Star map: NASA / GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA / Gaia / DPAC. Image Processing: M. Zamani / NSF NOIRLab)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s science team has discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids — a feat made possible by the Simonyi Survey Telescope’s advanced capabilities and data-crunching software developed at the University of Washington.

Rubin’s deluge of discoveries, based on a million early-stage observations that were collected over the course of a month and a half last summer, includes roughly 380 trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, and 33 previously unknown near-Earth objects. (Don’t panic: None of those near-Earth objects poses a threat to Earth.)

The data set also includes more than 80,000 previously known asteroids, some of which had been “lost” to science because of uncertainty about their orbits. The findings were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, the global clearinghouse for small solar system objects.

These aren’t the first finds for the $800 million observatory in Chile, which made its “First Look” debut last June. Astronomers previously reported finding more than 1,500 asteroids during earlier test rounds.

“This first large submission after Rubin First Look is just the tip of the iceberg and shows that the observatory is ready,” UW astronomer Mario Jurić, who heads Rubin’s solar system team, said in a news release. “What used to take years or decades to discover, Rubin will unearth in months. We are beginning to deliver on Rubin’s promise to fundamentally reshape our inventory of the solar system and open the door to discoveries we haven’t yet imagined.”

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Blue Origin jumps into the data center space race

Image: Satellite web
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (Credit: OneWeb)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is asking the Federal Communications Commission for authority to send up to 51,600 data center satellites into low Earth orbit, signaling its entry into an increasingly crowded space race.

The proposed constellation, dubbed Project Sunrise, would complement Blue Origin’s previously announced plans for a 5,408-satellite TeraWave constellation. TeraWave would provide ultra-high-speed connectivity for Project Sunrise’s satellites — and for terrestrial data centers, large-scale enterprises and government customers as well.

Once again, Bezos is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is seeking the FCC’s approval for a constellation of data centers that could amount to a million satellites. And SpaceX has already taken notice. So has Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is working on its own plans for a data center network that could call for tens of thousands of satellites.

Tech companies are becoming increasingly interested in fielding orbital data centers because such networks could bypass the power and cooling constraints facing Earth-based AI data centers. Last October, Bezos said at a tech conference in Italy that orbital data centers would be the “next step” in a transition from Earth-based to space-based industry. “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” he said.

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Rubin Observatory revs up its astronomical alert system

Illustration: Data alerts on night sky with Rubin Observatory in the mountains below
Each night, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory issues thousands of alerts about changes in the night sky. (NOIRLab / NSF / DOE-SC Illustration)

An astronomical alert system developed at the University of Washington started off with a bang this week, sending out 800,000 notifications about moving asteroids, exploding stars and other celestial changes detected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

That Feb. 24 surge was just the first wave. Eventually, the Alert Production Pipeline is expected to produce up to 7 million alerts per night. Astronomers will use the system to sift through the torrent of data, zeroing in on events ranging from newly detected asteroids to supernovas, variable stars and active galactic nuclei.

“Rubin’s alert system was designed to allow anyone to identify interesting astronomical events with enough notice to rapidly obtain time-critical follow-up observations,” Eric Bellm, a UW astronomer who leads the Alert Production Pipeline Group for the Rubin Observatory, said today in a news release. “Rubin will survey the sky at an unprecedented scale and allow us to find the most rare and unusual objects in the universe. We can’t wait to see the exciting science that comes from these data.”

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Sophia Space raises $10M for orbital computing systems

Illustration: Sophia Space data-processing satellite in orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Sophia 40 TILE satellite, with each tile powered by its own solar panel. (Sophia Space Illustration)

Sophia Space says it has closed a $10 million seed financing round to accelerate the development of orbital computing systems that could serve as the foundation for space-based data processing.

The startup’s tabletop-sized satellite modules, known as tiles, take advantage of a proprietary system that combines solar power generation and radiative cooling. Multiple tiles can be connected into racks to provide scalable computing power in low Earth orbit. The concept is called Thermal-Integrated LEO Edge, or TILE.

“With this seed round, we’re not just building compute modules,” Sophia Space CEO Rob DeMillo said today in a news release. “We’re building the infrastructure for the next era of space-based AI and data processing.”

The investment round was led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund and Unlock Venture Partners — and builds upon $3.5 million in pre-seed investment. The newly raised cash will support the continued hiring of engineering talent, the further maturation of Sophia’s TILE platform and the formation of strategic partnerships in the orbital computing ecosystem.

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Elon Musk lays out a new vision as SpaceX acquires xAI

Illustration: Starship deploying satellite with Earth in background
An artist's conception shows a Starship upper stage deploying a satellite in orbit. (SpaceX Illustration)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform.

That’s the upshot of today’s announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI. The Information quoted unnamed sources as saying that xAI was valued at $250 billion, while SpaceX’s value was set at a trillion dollars. That would make SpaceX the most valuable private company in the world — but because Musk held a controlling interest in both companies, those valuations may be somewhat subjective.

Ross Gerber, an investment adviser who tracks Musk’s business dealings, quipped on X that the world’s richest person decided to go ahead with the acquisition after “a short negotiation with himself.”

Musk said the combination of SpaceX and xAI would facilitate the creation of a new constellation of orbital data centers. SpaceX is already seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put up to a million satellites in low Earth orbit for such a constellation.

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SpaceX wants to launch a million data center satellites

Starlink streaks
This time-lapse image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. (Torsten Hansen / IAU OAE / CC Attribution)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk wasn’t kidding about his plans to go big with orbital data centers: The company is asking the Federal Communications Commission to approve a plan to put up to a million satellites in orbit to process data for artificial intelligence applications.

“Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization — one that can harness the sun’s full power — while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multiplanetary future amongst the stars,” SpaceX said in an application filed with the FCC on Friday.

If realized, the plan could pose a challenge to AI titans including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and OpenAI — and to Seattle-area space companies such as Starcloud, Sophia Space and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, all of which are aiming to serve the emerging market for AI data centers.

On the other hand, it could be a boon for SpaceX’s manufacturing facility in Redmond, Wash., which produces the satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation; and for Musk’s xAI company, which has been the focus of merger talks as SpaceX considers an initial public offering. The Wall Street Journal quoted unidentified sources as saying that Musk decided to take SpaceX public in part to raise more capital to build orbital data centers and to help xAI.

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