Cowboy files plans for up to 20,000 orbital data centers

TAMPA, Fla. — Cowboy Space has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for a 20,000-satellite “Stampede” orbital data center constellation, shortly after raising $275 million to develop rockets whose upper stages would serve as the computing platforms.

The San Carlos, California-based startup provided few details in the May 14 application about satellites it plans to begin launching in 2028, noting their design remains unfinished and will need a license modification before service.

The low Earth orbit (LEO) network would operate in dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits in shells between 700-1,000 kilometers above Earth, where they would use near-continuous solar energy to help bypass power, land, water and other constraints facing terrestrial data centers.

“Stampede is designed with scalability in mind and is capable of beginning commercial operations with as little as a single satellite in orbit,” Cowboy chief operating officer Joseph Yaffe said in the application, and will “progressively launch satellites and build out the system over the following months and years.”

Similar to recent orbital data center applications from SpaceX, Starcloud and Blue Origin, Cowboy is requesting multiple waivers from the FCC because its constellation would primarily rely on optical communications, rather than congested radio frequencies.

This includes a waiver for a rule requiring half the proposed satellites to be in LEO within six years, with the rest deployed three years later.

While massive by historical standards, Stampede is smaller than SpaceX’s plan for up to one million satellites, Starcloud’s 88,000-satellite system and Blue Origin’s 51,600-satellite Project Sunrise.

The application does not cover Cowboy’s planned rockets, which also remain in the design stage. Launch vehicle approvals are primarily handled by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

Cowboy has also not yet submitted plans to the FCC for a separate LEO constellation that would wirelessly beam solar power back to Earth, which was part of its original focus after being founded in 2024 by CEO Baiju Bhatt.

The venture nevertheless said it has achieved critical design and hardware milestones for that effort as part of the data center application, with an in-orbit power-beaming and optical laser link technology demonstration slated for later this year.

The startup aims to demonstrate a computing payload in LEO early next year, ahead of plans to begin launching one-megawatt data centers by the end of 2028. That demonstration would use NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin modules designed for AI computing in LEO.

While Cowboy said AI promises to be the defining technology of the 21st century, it argued in the application that its growth is increasingly constrained by access to power. 

“In short: By putting the silicon next to the sunlight, Stampede can skip the terrestrial power grid entirely and bypass the costs and delays associated with building data centers on Earth,” Yaffe said.

“Additionally, Stampede presents an unprecedented opportunity for the United States to maintain its leadership in space innovation through the deployment of advanced, continuous space-solar energy and GPU-class compute capacity that bypasses Earth’s constrained infrastructure.”

The application also showed that Bhatt and affiliates of the billionaire co-founder of financial services app Robinhood hold about 65% of Cowboy’s voting stock.

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