Startup announces 'Galactic Brain' project to put AI data centers in orbit

Aetherflux, a space-based solar technology company hoping to beam power down to Earth, is now throwing its hat into the orbital data center ring.

The company's new "Galactic Brain" project aims to speed up artificial intelligence data center production processes that are hampered on Earth by energy requirements and construction timelines by launching a constellation of solar-powered satellites capable of the same computing power without the bulky infrastructure.

"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy," Aetherflux founder and CEO Baiju Bhatt, who also co-founded the financial services company Robinhood, said in a press release today (Dec. 9). The company hopes to launch the first node of its Galactic Brain constellation sometime in the first quarter of 2027.

The announcement comes as AI computing power needs are rapidly increasing and major companies with skin already in the game such as OpenAI, Google and Amazon have begun seriously considering orbital solutions for their own computing needs.

"Satellites with localized AI compute, where just the results are beamed back from low-latency, sun-synchronous orbit, will be the lowest cost way to generate AI bitstreams in <3 years," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said about the topic in a Dec. 7 post on X.

Since its founding in 2024, California-based Aetherflux has focused its efforts on space-based solar power, with the goal of "building an American power grid in space," and the company's new Galactic Brain initiative fits neatly into that vision.

"Continuous solar power and advanced thermal systems remove the limits faced by Earth-based data centers," the Aetherflux release said, describing the company's planned power-beaming capabilities as "foundational" to its orbital data center initiative, "enabling energy collected in space to support not only compute in orbit but also power delivery on Earth."

According to Aetherflux's design, many small satellites will transmit energy through infrared lasers to ground stations, where the power and data can be subsequently distributed. "We anticipate powerbeaming to be dramatically more reliable than current solar power generation on the ground," the release said.

The company hopes to launch its first power-beaming demonstration satellite to low Earth orbit sometime in 2026.