World’s first solar-powered data centre in space

On 9 December, Aetherflux announced a Q1 2027 target for its first orbital data centre satellite, which leverages solar power in space to address the massive energy needs for artificial intelligence. 

The project, dubbed "Galactic Brain", offers a bypass to the current five-to-eight-year time horizon for building data centres on Earth.

Access to energy is one of the primary bottlenecks for scaling artificial intelligence. This problem is driven by infrastructure timelines: securing real estate, establishing utility connections and constructing new data centres can take more than half a decade.

"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy,” said Baiju Bhatt, founder and CEO of Aetherflux, and co-founder of Robinhood.

“The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won't get us there fast enough.

"Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely."

Aetherflux's first data centre node for commercial use is targeted for the first quarter of 2027; subsequent satellite launches will build a constellation of nodes to scale capacity. This builds upon the company's existing work developing space-solar satellites for beaming power to contested environments.

In 2026, the company plans to launch its first satellite to transmit energy wirelessly from low-Earth orbit to Earth, using lasers.