Robinhood Co-Founder's New Venture Aims to Launch Twenty Thousand Space Data Centers

Baiju Bhatt wants to put twenty thousand artificial intelligence data centers in low Earth orbit. The Robinhood co-founder revealed his new venture, Cowboy Space, with the introduction of a massive stainless-steel rocket called Big Iron. The vehicle introduces a radical structural twist where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite once it reaches orbit.

That upper stage will weigh fifteen thousand kilograms on Earth and deploy five racks of graphics processing units to provide one megawatt of compute payload. Our read is that the sheer logistics of this plan dwarf the engineering hurdle of building the hardware. Cowboy Space intends to build a constellation named Stampede, which requires twenty thousand individual rocket launches plus thousands more every year just for maintenance.

To hit that cadence, the company plans multiple launches per day from future complexes called Trailheads, while also offering commercial launch services dubbed Big Iron Express. The physical architecture borrows heavily from proven heavy-lift concepts while scaling up for thermal challenges. Powered by methalox engines named Clydesdale, the reusable first stage will land on ships at sea much like existing commercial boosters.

Meanwhile, the orbital payload fairing will double as a radiator to dump the immense heat generated by the onboard processors into the vacuum of space.

Those flights remain years away as the startup tests its engines ahead of a tentative first launch in December 2028.

Bhatt acknowledged the ambitious timeline is far from guaranteed.

Whether a single company can achieve a launch frequency that outpaces entire national space agencies remains the ultimate test for the orbital computing frontier.