LOS ANGELES, June 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Orbital, a space infrastructure company building AI data centers in Low Earth Orbit, today announced a $5 million pre-seed round to accelerate development of its orbital compute satellites, designed to harness solar energy to power intelligence.
The round was led by a16z speedrun and includes participation from Basis Set, Human Element, Wayfinder, Antler, Anti Fund, Ascent, Rubik, Zero Knowledge Ventures, LYVC, Feld Ventures, New Legacy, FNDR, UpHonest and Asterisk. The financing funds Orbital’s first in-orbit technology demonstration, Pathfinder, and the initial development of Orbital-1, the first purpose-built satellite for AI compute. The round precedes a larger financing round as Orbital moves from validation to scaled manufacturing and constellation deployment, and builds Factory-1, its manufacturing facility in Los Angeles.
Orbital’s efforts target a hard constraint now facing the AI industry. The International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity consumption will more than double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, roughly the entire annual electricity consumption of a nation the size of Japan, underscoring the scale of AI’s infrastructure challenge. In the U.S., grid operators are facing growing pressure to deliver power fast enough to match data center buildout plans, while cooling capacity, land and permitting are becoming major bottlenecks on terrestrial data center development.
“The sun is the most abundant and accessible source of energy in the universe, yet we’ve barely begun to tap into it,” said Euwyn Poon, Founder and CEO of Orbital. “Orbital is turning that energy directly into intelligence. We’re building AI data centers in orbit, where solar power is continuous and heat dissipates into the void of space. Advances in launch infrastructure are making this an imminent reality, not science fiction. This infrastructure will power intelligence for the planet.”
Unlike conventional notions of large orbital structures, Orbital’s architecture distributes compute across many small, independently deployable satellites, creating a constellation-based approach designed to avoid the structural and manufacturing constraints of building large structures in orbit. Rather than treating orbital compute as a single massive data center in space, Orbital is building a distributed network of compute nodes that can scale horizontally, satellite by satellite, and tackling the engineering challenges of this system.
“At Orbital, we’re assembling a team that combines decades of aerospace engineering experience with a novel problem-solving mindset,” said Poon. “We’re tackling some of the hardest engineering challenges in the industry, including extreme thermal management and design for manufacturability, at a satellite size and constellation scale that has never been attempted before.”
Orbital is purpose-built for AI inference, the fastest-growing segment of compute demand. Its systems are being designed around NVIDIA’s publicly announced Space-1 Vera Rubin-class GPU architecture. Each satellite is engineered around three advantages that are difficult to achieve on the ground: uninterrupted solar energy, radiative cooling directly into space and distributed satellite-based compute.
Orbital’s first mission, Pathfinder, is slated for 2027 and will fly a hosted GPU payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. The mission will test GPU operation, radiation tolerance, thermal performance and data downlink in orbit. It will be followed by Orbital-1, the first purpose-built orbital compute satellite.
Production satellites are being designed for 100 kW of compute power, with a long-term vision of a constellation of 100,000+ satellites delivering more than 10 GW of orbital compute. To support that scale, Orbital is developing Factory-1, a satellite assembly and testing facility in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.
About Orbital
Orbital is a Los Angeles-based space infrastructure company building AI data centers in low Earth orbit. Its orbital compute satellites are designed to harness continuous solar energy, radiative cooling and scalable satellite architecture to support the demands of AI inference.
For more information, please visit: www.orbital.inc
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