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The not-in-my-backyard, anti-AI data center crew has at least one prominent supporter: Robinhood (HOOD) co-founder and space racer Baiju Bhatt. Bhatt has a vested interest in putting data centers into space: His upstart rocket firm, Cowboy Space Corporation, is laser-focused on such a mission.
"I personally think it's critical [to build data centers in space]" the Cowboy Space Corporation founder and CEO said on a new episode of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast (video above; listen in below). "I think we're already starting to see the effects of using so much of our terrestrial energy grid for data centers. And you see this movement of 'not my backyard.' And I think as we look specifically around the United States, our energy infrastructure on this planet, I'd like to see it used for people. And let's build a big power grid in space and use that for AI."
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Bhatt added, "I think the appeal of this is also that once this gets up and running, the prospect of bringing new chip sets online actually transitions from, hey, let's go get a land lease and work with the local power plant and work with local communities and do all this stuff — which has a pretty long delay time — to saying let's take those chip sets and integrate them into a spacecraft and get it to the launchpad. We think that we can do that in a matter of weeks, whereas the process right now is pushing five to seven years in a lot of cases."
After earning degrees in physics and mathematics from Stanford University, Bhatt, whose father was a research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, began his career in financial technology by co-founding two trading software startups in New York alongside his friend Vlad Tenev.
By 2013, the pair had co-founded online trading platform Robinhood. Bhatt served as co-CEO of Robinhood until late 2020, and subsequently took on the role of chief creative officer, helping shepherd the platform through its high-profile 2021 initial public offering.
After stepping down from his executive duties at Robinhood in early 2024 (Tenev remains as CEO) while retaining his seat on its board of directors, Bhatt shifted his focus toward frontier space ventures.
In late 2024, he launched space technology company Aetherflux (later changing the name to Cowboy Space Corporation), aiming to build orbital solar power and space-based data center infrastructure.