Orbital

Orbital (legally Orbital Compute, Inc.) is a Los Angeles-based startup founded in early 2026 by CEO Euwyn Poon to build a constellation of GPU-equipped satellites in low Earth orbit for running Nvidia AI compute workloads in space. Its pitch is that space offers continuous, low-competition solar power and can use the vacuum as a passive heat sink for cooling, advantages the company argues let it scale AI infrastructure faster and more cheaply than terrestrial data centers once satellites are in mass production. The founding team is drawn from Amazon's Leo satellite-internet program, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space Systems.

Orbital raised an oversubscribed $5 million pre-seed round backed by a16z's Speedrun program and the NVIDIA Inception program, with additional participation from Basis Set, Human Element, Wayfinder, Anti Fund and Antler. In April 2026 the company signed Reflex Aerospace, the German satellite manufacturer, as the exclusive satellite-platform provider for its first dedicated spacecraft, Orbital-1, targeted for a 2028 launch. Orbital's publicly stated roadmap calls for a smaller Pathfinder hosted-payload demonstration of AI inference compute in low Earth orbit in 2027, flying on a SpaceX Falcon 9, ahead of the multi-GPU-node Orbital-1 spacecraft.

As of its FCC filings in mid-2026, Orbital had outlined ambitions to eventually deploy up to 100,000 satellites, a plan that drew scrutiny from astronomers and space-debris researchers over its potential effects on the night sky and orbital congestion. The company had not flown any hardware as of its most recent public disclosures.