Cowboy Space Corp.

Building data centers in space for artificial intelligence.

Cowboy Space Corporation is an orbital infrastructure company building rockets and satellites that double as data centers in low Earth orbit, aimed at operators who need power and compute for AI workloads outside the constraints of terrestrial grids. The San Carlos, California-based startup is building rockets with upper stages that would serve as data centers once in low Earth orbit (LEO) , and designing the rocket upper stage and data center payload as a single vehicle reduces redundant mass, optimizing the amount of power and compute delivered to orbit . The launch video introduces the rocket program under the name Stampede, signaling that hardware development is now public. The company was founded less than two years ago as Aetherflux to develop space-based solar power by Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood Markets Inc. , and this announcement marks the rebrand to Cowboy Space along with a sharper focus on AI compute. In orbit, each upper stage becomes a 1-megawatt data center, and Cowboy is also collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules, bringing state-of-the-art AI infrastructure to the Low Earth Orbit environment. The launch matters now because demand for AI compute is outrunning what ground-based data centers can power and cool, and the existing commercial launch market does not have enough capacity to lift the gigawatts of compute being proposed for orbit. Vertical integration of the rocket and the payload is Cowboy's wager that owning the full stack, from propulsion to optical downlink, will let it move faster than buyers waiting on third-party rides, with first launch expected before the end of 2028 .

Tags

Comments (11)