The rapid advancement of large language models is fueling a global data center boom and driving a surge in energy demand. But the electricity required to power data centers is straining the grid, pushing infrastructure operators to search for alternative sources of power. Some are even looking beyond Earth. One company that’s looking to the stars for energy is Orbital Inc. In mid-April, the Los Angeles–based startup emerged from stealth and announced plans to build space data centers. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Orbital is designing infrastructure for AI inference, where trained models generate outputs.

Much like other companies advocating for space-based data centers, Orbital is banking on the “free” energy generated by the sun to power compute for workloads such as chatbots and agents, sidestepping terrestrial energy constraints. “There simply isn’t enough capacity here [on Earth], and the only way is up,” says Euwyn Poon, Orbital’s founder and CEO. “There’s actually abundant solar energy that’s not being harnessed.” Orbital’s vision is a mesh constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit. Each satellite would be equipped with a GPU server rack powered by solar…