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California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.
“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.
The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.
Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.
The city of Kent, which is about 20 miles south of Seattle, is one of the hotspots for space companies in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing’s Kent Space Center remains active more than 50 years after building NASA’s Apollo moon rovers. The city also hosts Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Stoke Space, which was founded by Blue Origin alumni.
Cowboy Space, previously known as Aetherflux, plans to send its own rockets into low Earth orbit starting as early as 2028, with the upper stages outfitted to serve as solar-powered orbital data centers. The Stampede constellation is one of several planned projects aimed at getting around the land, power and water constraints that have made ground-based AI data centers increasingly controversial.
“We are building what I call the last big clean-sheet launch vehicle in my lifetime, so it’s going to be a very big heavy-lift vehicle, and we’re working every day to bring it to reality,” Warren Lamont, Cowboy Space’s head of launch and propulsion, said this week in a LinkedIn video. Lamont, who previously worked for IonQ and Blue Origin, is one of the executives heading up Cowboy Space’s engineering hub in the Seattle area.
The company announced in May that it raised $275 million in a Series B funding round, in part to expand its production capability. Cowboy is collaborating with Nvidia to deploy the chip giant’s Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in orbit. And in July, it secured a deal to test its propulsion system at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
“We’re really excited to get into first engine hot-fire next year,” Lamont said.
Cowboy Space’s potential competitors include SpaceX, which wants to launch up to a million AI-processing satellites; and Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is setting up a production facility in Woodinville, Wash., and seeking authorization for up to 88,000 data center satellites.
We’ve reached out to Cowboy Space and will update this report with any new information.
Summary Bullets:
AI is changing the cloud landscape, creating the near-term need for a vast increase in processing power and storage space. Hyperscalers are responding with substantial facility construction plans. Just this year alone, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft Azure are pouring a total of $500 to $700 billion into extensions of their data center footprints. Given AI’s dominance in enterprise technology investment plans, this is a logical track. However, not everyone is on board with these aggressive development plans -and AI plays a role in that resistance.
Fifty-two percent of adults are more worried than excited about AI, according to results from a Pew Research Center survey of 3,488 adults fielded earlier this year. Those queried had trepidations related to AI about everything from job displacement and interference with human creativity to unreliable or even malicious output.
AI anxiety is translating into opposition to in-region data center expansion. A Gallup poll of 1,000 US adults conducted earlier this year, found that 71% of those surveyed are totally opposed to the building of new data center facilities used to support AI applications in their region. By comparison, 53% object to construction of a new nuclear energy plant – a perennially unpopular build in the US for decades.
Participants in the telephone survey cited several concerns related to the new data center expansion, primarily focused on resource consumption, cost, and quality-of-life impacts. Fifty percent said excessive resource requirements associated with these builds in areas like water and energy consumption along with secondary effects such as loss of farmland, wildlife, and deforestation are behind their resistance to facilities’ expansion in their areas. Twenty-two cited concerns about property values and increased traffic. Another 20 percent noted that new data centers might bring higher utility costs and cost of living expenses.
Localities are hearing and responding to this resistance to data center expansion. Due to regional complaints, more than $100 billion in facility buildouts was stopped or disrupted in just one quarter. Over 550 local governments have suspended new facility construction or stopped issuing new permits.
Industry observers warn that impeding expansion could have unintended harmful consequences, including hindering the establishment of effective cyber defenses against hostile adversaries and creating barriers to the development and deployment of technological innovations. But cloud providers have been adept at circumventing obstacles to expansion, finding locations in more remote areas that are more hospitable to new facility construction.
Hyperscalers and other cloud providers are targeting more rural areas in the South and Midwest, and more remote locales in states like Oklahoma, Maine, and Virginia. Nearly half of all new data center builds are in the south, with states like Texas being hot spots.
The post Public Opposition to New Data Centers Disrupts but Doesn’t Derail US Facilities’ Expansion appeared first on IT Connection.
Starcloud says it has raised $250 million in new funding to support the creation of a constellation of data center satellites powered by Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips.
The Series A extension funding round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors including Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX and 776. Among the new investors joining for this round are Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital and Standard Capital.
Founded in 2024, Starcloud is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., and is building production lines for its Starcloud-3 spacecraft at a new 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Wash. The newly announced round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $450 million, with a post-money valuation of $2.3 billion.
Nvidia’s participation in the funding round brings Starcloud’s collaboration with the computer-chip titan to a new level. In November 2025, Starcloud flew Nvidia’s H100 GPU to orbit for the first time. It used the chip to train a large language model called NanoGPT — marking a milestone in space-based AI data processing.
Starcloud plans to equip future satellites with Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, which Nvidia says will deliver 25 times as much in-space compute capability as the H100. Starcloud’s satellites will serve as an early flight platform for the space-rated chips.
“This fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs into space,” Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston said today in a news release.
Starcloud says the new investment will fund the continued buildout of manufacturing capacity, engineering work in collaboration with Nvidia and the procurement of future launch slots. Manhattan West’s Lauren Selig will join Starcloud’s team as a board observer.
Starcloud has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to operate as many as 88,000 satellites as orbital data centers for AI and other applications. It’s not the only company targeting the market for orbital data centers. Most notably, SpaceX has filed its own plans to put up to a million data center satellites in space, for a project called Starmind.
The push to move AI infrastructure into space is driven by growing terrestrial bottlenecks surrounding land, power and water consumption — and by the political controversies those bottlenecks have sparked.
Sophia Space has secured a patent for a technology that could pave the way for solar-powered orbital data centers that passively radiate excess heat into space.
Developed in partnership with Caltech, Sophia’s architecture tackles a major hurdle in orbital computing: how to cool thousands of chips running artificial intelligence applications in space.
Traditional designs rely on satellite-wide radiator systems with heat pumps and circulating fluids. In contrast, Sophia plans to build flat, modular tiles equipped with four processors each. The tiles draw power from solar cells on their sunlit side, and shed heat into the cold vacuum of space from their dark side.
This approach avoids having to put a cooling system in the central bus of every satellite, said Leon Alkalai, Sophia Space’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer. “I think you will find in time that our approach is much more favorable when we scale to larger wattage systems, because bringing everything into a bus can only be done until a certain level, and then it becomes almost impossible to do,” he told GeekWire. “Our benefit is really scalability.”
An added benefit of the satellite design is that each tile is powered independently. “The connectivity between the tiles is with fiber optic connectors,” Alkalai said. “Only data is shared. No power, no thermal, no copper wires. It’s just fiber optic links.”
Alkalai and his team came up with a fitting acronym for the design of the modules: TILE, which stands for Thermal Integrated LEO Edge. (LEO stands for “low Earth orbit.”)
Alkalai founded Sophia Space after he finished up a 32-year career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and transitioned to the space startup world in 2021. The company is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., but also has corporate connections to Seattle. This week, Alkalai was one of the featured speakers for Seattle Tech Week.
The TILE approach to orbital electronics came out of a Caltech research project that initially focused on space solar power systems.
“That was before 2022, when ChatGPT was announced,” Alkalai said. “Once that happened, within a year, all hell broke loose in the data center world, saying we need a thousand times more energy to power AI — and our reason to exist just skyrocketed.”
Putting data centers in orbit would get around some of the problems associated with terrestrial data centers — for example, the mushrooming requirements for real estate and the huge drain on electrical grids. But the cooling issue has loomed as a key impediment for orbital computing.
Alkalai said the “eureka moment” came when he and his fellow researchers came up with a way to balance out the solar power absorbed by the front of the tile, the power requirements for the processing chips, and the heat radiating out the back. “We did the basic math and said, ‘Oh my God, this can work,'” he recalled.
The patent application for “Space-Based Data Centers” was filed in October 2024, and the patent was granted to Sophia Space and Caltech on July 14. In addition to Alkalai, six other members of the team are listed as inventors: John Brophy, Jonathan Sauder, Timothy McElrath and Douglas Sheldon at JPL; Sergio Pellegrino at Caltech; and Don Hunter, a JPL retiree.
In a news release, Brophy said the TILE architecture “was developed as part of JPL’s mission to address challenges of national significance by applying unique JPL talent.”
“This is an illustration of how JPL, Caltech and private industry can work together to rapidly develop solutions to difficult technical problems for the benefit of the nation,” he said.
Alkalai said his fellow inventors will share in the fruits of the patent. “All of them are involved in Sophia, and they have equity in the company,” he said. “And with Caltech, we’ve signed a contract to continue doing research with Sergio Pellegrino and his students. … We are continuing this effort with the original inventors. They are consulting and are equity holders of Sophia.”
The development timeline calls for Sophia to fly its first technology demonstrator next year. “We’ve announced that we are partnering with Apex satellites,” Alkalai said. “We’re using their Nova bus … and that will be the first-ever tech demo of a tile with four GPUs.”
Alkalai said Sophia Space plans to start selling TILE systems and related components to customers in 2028, and start testing the system’s capabilities with a constellation of four to six satellites in the 2029-2030 time frame.
“What that will do is demonstrate the end-to-end system,” he said. “Then, in the new decade, we can scale up to larger numbers in the constellation, larger numbers of tiles, and so on.”
Alkalai said obtaining the newly issued patent is part of Sophia’s plan to build up a strong portfolio of intellectual property.
“If anybody wants to license or use our TILE and use our scalable approach, we could turn that into a business,” he said. “Protecting your IP is not only to deny, it’s also to enable. And I see it more as the latter. Why would somebody fight it? They could license it, and we could make this applicable all over the world.”
Alkalai said the orbital data centers that are being planned by other companies — for example, SpaceX’s ambitious Starmind network and the satellite constellation envisioned by Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud — don’t appear to be designed to take advantage of passive cooling and would thus raise no questions of infringement on Sophia Space’s patent. But he suspects that the TILE architecture will eventually become the standard for orbital data centers.
“I’ve been on this quest for five years, and I really feel very, very good about this particular topic, because I think it’s of benefit to humanity,” Alkalai said. “This is not just a money issue, or about benefits to me or my team. I just think this is a good direction for humanity as we evolve into a space economy.”
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