Cowboy Space raises $275M to build rocket-data center hybrid
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- Cowboy Space Corporation closed a $275 million Series B at a $2 billion post-money valuation, led by Index Ventures with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC participating; the startup had previously raised $80 million.
- Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, launched the company in 2024 as Aetherflux to beam space solar power to Earth, then pivoted to orbital data centers, and is now rebranding it as Cowboy Space Corporation to reflect an in-house rocket program targeting a first launch before end of 2028.
- Cowboy Space will design its rocket so that the data center payload is built directly into the second stage — a throwback to Explorer 1 — with each satellite massing 20,000–25,000 kg, generating 1 MW for nearly 800 onboard GPUs, and slightly more powerful than SpaceX's Falcon 9.
- Bhatt said he explored contracting existing launch providers but found projected capacity four years out to be 'very, very scarce,' with first-party rockets specializing into their own payloads, leaving no viable path to scale orbital data centers economically.
- Cowboy Space has hired former SpaceX launch director Tyler Grinnell and former Blue Origin propulsion engineer Warren Lamont, and plans to build its own rocket engine — the most complex and expensive component of any launch vehicle.
- Cowboy Space's vertical integration puts it in direct competition with SpaceX and Blue Origin, the only Western companies with consistent commercial launch track records; other startups like Stoke Space, Firefly, and Relativity have spent years without delivering operational systems.
- Bhatt argues demand for AI compute is getting 'more and more acute' while terrestrial options get 'more and more limited,' and that the market is large enough for multiple launch players to succeed.
Why it matters: By vertically integrating rocket and data center into a single vehicle, Cowboy Space is bypassing the launch bottleneck that has stalled every other orbital data center plan — but it is also taking on SpaceX and Blue Origin head-on with a company that has never flown a rocket, betting $2 billion of implied valuation on reaching the pad by end of 2028.
