Euwyn Poon built 250,000 e-scooters at Spin. Now he wants to put data centers in space.
Poon's new venture, Orbital, has closed a $5 million funding round aimed at launching space-based data centers. The stated ambition: 10,000 of them in orbit. The announcement offered no details on launch partners, timeline, or the hardware architecture that would make orbiting compute economically viable. What it did offer is a founder with a track record of scaling physical hardware at consumer scale.
Terrestrial data centers are running into hard limits: land scarcity, power grid pressure, and cooling costs. A small but growing cohort of investors is placing bets on orbital compute as the long-run alternative. At $5 million, this is deep seed territory for a capital-intensive hardware play; building and launching satellites typically costs orders of magnitude more before you serve a single query.
Ten thousand space data centers is a number that lives comfortably on a pitch deck. The interesting question is what number one looks like.