Top AI Product

Okay, so hear me out — what if, instead of building yet another massive data center in the middle of nowhere and fighting over grid power, you just… launched your servers into space? That’s exactly what [Sophia Space](https://sophia.space) is betting on, and after their [$10M seed round](https://spacenews.com/sophia-space-claims-10-million-in-seed-round/) closed on February 24, a lot of people are starting to take this idea seriously.

The timing here is almost poetic. On the very same day Sophia announced its funding, [Axios reported](https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/ai-data-center-boom-projects-numbers) that 11 gigawatts of planned data center capacity is stalled worldwide because of power constraints and grid shortages. The AI boom is literally running out of electricity on the ground. So why not go where the sun never stops shining?

Here’s how it works. Sophia’s core product is the TILE — a flat compute module that’s one meter square and just one centimeter thick. Each one packs four Nvidia Jetson Orin servers, generates its own solar power on one face, and dumps waste heat straight into the vacuum of space through passive radiative cooling. The company says [92% of the energy each TILE generates goes directly to compute](https://www.geekwire.com/2026/sophia-space-10m-space-computing-network/). That’s a wildly efficient number compared to terrestrial data centers burning through megawatts just on cooling alone.

The whole thing is managed by SOOS — the Sophia Orbital Operating System — which handles workload distribution, thermal management, and keeps individual components from frying themselves. Multiple TILEs can be racked together into constellations, scaling compute power in low Earth orbit the way you’d add nodes to a cloud cluster.

The company was founded in 2023 by Leon Alkalai, a retired fellow from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Pasadena-based team is packed with former JPL engineers and cloud infrastructure folks. The seed round was led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $13.5M. The plan is to begin ground testing this year and fly the [first in-orbit demo in late 2027](https://payloadspace.com/sophia-space-raises-10m-to-build-orbital-data-center-precursor/), with full operational orbital data centers targeted for the 2030s.

The [Hacker News thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136109) blew up with predictable skepticism — latency concerns, debris risks, maintenance headaches — but also genuine curiosity. And honestly, those are fair questions. But when you look at the energy crisis terrestrial AI infrastructure is facing right now, an approach that turns the harshest environment in existence into free cooling and unlimited solar power starts to look less crazy and more inevitable. Sophia Space might be early, but they’re solving a problem that’s only getting worse.