Overview
- Cowboy Space, which announced the deal Monday, closed a $275 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation led by Index Ventures, bringing total funding to about $365 million.
- The company plans a proprietary rocket whose upper stage stays in orbit as a one‑megawatt data center sized for 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms and about 800 GPUs.
- A staged roadmap calls for an infrared power‑beaming demo with Apex later in 2026, a small NVIDIA‑based “Galactic Brain” compute node early in 2027, and a first launch carrying a 1 MW data center by the end of 2028.
- CEO Baiju Bhatt said he turned to an in‑house launcher after he could not secure enough commercial lift to scale orbital compute at costs that compete with ground data centers.
- Key technical details, regulatory approvals, and unit economics remain unproven, as rivals including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and newer entrants also test orbital data‑center concepts in response to strained power and cooling on Earth.