Space energy group Aetherflux has announced that its first orbital data center will be commercially operational by the first quarter of 2027.

Termed the “Galactic Brain” project, the data center will empower artificial intelligence by utilizing the enhanced solar energy capacity of space.

"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy. The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won't get us there fast enough," said Baiju Bhatt, founder and CEO of Aetherflux, in a statement. "Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely."

Bhatt is also the co-founder and former co-chief executive of the financial services company Robinhood. He started Aetherflux in October 2024 with the intention of creating a space-based solar power (SBSP) constellation that beamed power to Earth via infrared laser. He was portrayed in the 2023 film Dumb Money, which dramatizes the 2021 GameStop short squeeze.

The company stresses the bottlenecks in AI growth to be in real estate acquisition of land for data centers, their associated utility connections, their construction, and operational energy usage, which it estimates takes five to eight years to navigate, suggesting that achieving the same results in low Earth orbit is easier, allowing them to “bypass” this bottleneck.

Aetherflux uses the terms “data center node” and “data center satellite,” implying the company intends to produce a satellite with on-orbit processing and solar panels, a modest design by today’s standards, rather than a space-based platform with the computing power of a data center.

Aetherflux expects launches of these satellites to scale as part of its existing ambitions for a space-solar constellation. The launch of its first SBSP satellite is expected in 2026.

The company raised $50m from Index, Interlagos, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA earlier this year in a Series A funding round. Actor Jared Leto was also in the round. To date, Aetherflux has raised $60 million.

The economic question of why data centers would be more efficient or convenient in space is still being understood, but has been very popular following remarks on the topic made by Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week 2025 in October, when he predicted the computing power of gigawatt data centers would be installed aboard space stations in “no more than 20 years.”

This prediction has led some in the space sector to begin describing satellites with processors capable of Edge compute, as orbital data centers, in an act of speculative opportunism.