Orbital wins a16z backing

Orbital has raised backing from Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program to test whether artificial intelligence data centers can run in orbit instead of on Earth. (siliconangle.com) Orbital said the money will fund Orbital-1, a first satellite mission scheduled for April 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, plus a research and development site called Factory-1 in Los Angeles. The company did not disclose the size of the investment. (markets.businessinsider.com) The basic pitch is simple: put servers on satellites, power them with solar arrays, and dump heat into space through radiators instead of relying on electric grids and water-hungry cooling systems on the ground. Orbital said each spacecraft would carry NVIDIA-powered servers in low Earth orbit. (markets.businessinsider.com) Orbital is not trying to train giant models in space. It is targeting inference, the stage where a trained model answers prompts one request at a time, because those jobs can be spread across many separate machines more easily than tightly linked training runs. (markets.businessinsider.com) That distinction reflects a real bottleneck on Earth. Built In reported on April 14 that artificial intelligence infrastructure spending is colliding with rising power demand, cooling needs and community opposition to new terrestrial data centers. (builtin.com) Orbital’s 2027 test is meant to answer narrower questions first: whether commercial graphics processing units can run for long periods in orbit, whether shielding and software can handle radiation, and whether customers will pay for inference jobs processed off-planet. (markets.businessinsider.com) Founder Euwyn Poon previously started Spin, the scooter company Ford bought in 2018, and Light Reading reported Orbital was founded earlier in 2026 with a longer-term goal of scaling to about 10,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites. The same report said Orbital is opening its first manufacturing and research site in Los Angeles. (lightreading.com) The company says it already has space hardware credentials beyond the new funding round. On its website, Orbital says it has flown a 100-terabyte-plus server on the International Space Station, worked on Axiom Space’s orbital data center node, and sent a commercial data server toward the Moon. (orbitalaifactory.com) Other groups are also testing pieces of the same idea. Axiom Space and Spacebilt said in September 2025 that they plan to place an optical, high-performance data center node on the International Space Station in 2027 for storage, processing and artificial intelligence workloads in low Earth orbit. (axiomspace.com) Skeptics argue that launch costs, orbital debris, satellite failures, data sovereignty rules and the economics of replacing hardware in space could outweigh any gains from free sunlight and cold vacuum. Built In reported those concerns alongside the new wave of orbital data center proposals on April 14. (builtin.com) For now, Andreessen Horowitz is paying to find out whether the first step works. If Orbital-1 reaches orbit in April 2027 and runs sustained inference there, the company will have moved the debate from slides to hardware. (markets.businessinsider.com)