新太空競賽：初創公司推進「軌道基礎設施」，測試太空資料中心可行性
The New Space Race: Startups Press Ahead on ‘Orbital Infrastructure,’ Test Feasibility of Data Centers
Cowboy Space 公佈專用資料中心火箭，可將搭載 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU 的五個機架送入軌道，並計劃以「Big Iron Express」名義提供發射服務，與 SpaceX 競爭。
Space data centers, once confined to sci-fi novels and ambitious pitch decks, are beginning to get real.
A SpaceX rocket earlier this month carried an experimental Google satellite that will make simple requests to Gemini while researchers test how its four TPUs hold up in space. The same launch carried the Reason-1 satellite from startup Cowboy Space, which is experimenting with beaming solar power back to Earth with a laser.
Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt and backed by Jan Hammer at Index Ventures, among others, this week unveiled an even bigger swing: its own purpose-built data center rocket that can carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit. The startup also plans to use this rocket to compete with SpaceX in selling launch services to others under the name “Big Iron Express.”
Bhatt told Newcomer that his company’s “north star” is to make space compute cost-competitive with terrestrial compute, and that it’s vertically integrating to the extreme to achieve that end. Another well-funded player is Starcloud, backed by Benchmark and currently valued at $2.3 billion.
來源：Newcomer 新聞長文 · newcomer.co