Aetherflux Inc.

I mean, I, I don't wanna jump straight to orbital data centers, but it is one of my favorite topics 'cause it's just so brilliantly sci-fi.

You're an investor in a, in a company called Cowboy Space, founded by one of the Robinhood co-founders that's, that's trying to do this.

Like, what's-- Why do we need to put data centers in space? Is that, is that something that the AI boom really can enable?

I think that the, the bull case for this and the investment case for putting data centers in space is that we don't have enough data centers on Earth that are going to be able to power the CapEx cycle for what we want to achieve with AI.

Uh, the science behind it, that we can use robotics and, uh, and get things into space, that's totally proven.

That's fine.

So then the question is: how do we get the electricity back and, uh, power all these things? And that's what Cowboy Space is working on at a pr- cost point, and this is the most important point, at a cost point per G- GPU that we can do on Earth.

And so th- that's the point that is unproven at this point, and that's where the investment is going.

Today, we're discussing the emerging space economy.

I am joined by Joseph Yaffe, chief operating officer and chief legal officer of Cowboy Space, a deep tech startup building vertically integrated orbital data centers.

I'm also joined by Brian Weeden, director of civil and commercial policy for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation, and Dan Wald, director of space and AI at Booz Allen Hamilton.

[gentle music] Gentlemen, welcome to the Cogs of War podcast.

Great.

Good morning.

Joe Yaffe, chief operating officer, chief legal officer of Cowboy Space Corporation.

At Cowboy Space, we're building an American energy grid in orbit, and we're doing a couple of different things.

What if the future of AI isn't a massive data center on Earth, but orbiting hundreds of miles above it? One company is developing rockets, satellites, and space-based data centers designed to tackle the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence.

We got to take a closer look at the vision and the challenges ahead with Cowboy Space Corporation's Chief Operating and Legal Officer, Joseph Yaffe.

What we're building is a vertically integrated vehicle, so we're building a rocket.

A second stage is the data center and then an optical backbone to provide up and downlink optical data transmission.

The presumption is we can't until you say yes.

And that's what I kind of like to drive towards.

Joseph Yaffe is chief operating officer and chief legal officer for Cowboy Space Corporation.

For our final interview, NASA's newest space telescope wasn't built to zoom in on a single mystery.

You know, there's a company founded by the co-founder of Robinhood, Beju Bhatt.

He founded a company called Aetherflux, which was just planning to do that, right? They were going to build these massive solar arrays, and they were going to beam down the energy.

And they actually pivoted away because... you know, where do we expect a lot more energy consumption to come from? It's AI data centers.

And he said, okay, instead of beaming the energy down to the terrestrial data center, why not just move the chips up to the sky? Just like maybe Elon Musk's SpaceX space data center vision.

Regionally, the report projects Europe will grow fastest at approximately 43.6% annually, while North America holds the second largest share by 2040.

The report names StarCloud, Axiom Space, Kepler Communications, Cowboy Space Corporation, and SpaceX among the sector's major companies.

And that's Space Commerce Week for Sunday, August 30th.

I'm Tom Patton.

And so you see things happening, more and more launch vehicle companies starting to come up.

Like Cowboy Space is now...

Like, they wanna do data centers in space.

Well, they're gonna also do the rocket because [laughs] they know, like, they can't count on access to space.

So while this isn't a story we're going to talk about, I wanted to take a real quick detour to discuss a guy who runs Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt.

Baiju has now founded a company called Cowboy Space Corporation, which sounds like the start of some like weird Mad Lib.

[chuckles]

Space c- Cowboy Space Corporation is looking to launch data centers into space.

That is the whole idea.

It's an absolutely bonkers idea, and you just put me onto, a couple weeks ago, a piece from "The Times" that details about the amount of space garbage that rocks our planet on a yearly basis.

Yeah

... other planet.

Tell me, um, you know, I, I've been thinking a lot about, uh, and, you know, we've had a couple other orbital data center folks on the show.

Cowboy Space Corp is the other founder that we've had.

Uh, he described his approach to us in terms of he wants to, uh, uh, it's a-

No boot