太空数据中心竞赛升温：Google 卫星在轨测试 TPU，Cowboy Space 推出轨道数据中心火箭
The New Space Race: Startups Press Ahead on ‘Orbital Infrastructure,’ Test Feasibility of Data Centers
Newcomer 报道太空数据中心创业进展。SpaceX 本月早些时候的一次发射搭载了 Google 实验卫星，研究人员将测试其四颗 TPU 在太空的运行表现，并让卫星向 Gemini 发送简单请求；同次发射还搭载 Cowboy Space 的 Reason-1 卫星，试验用激光把太阳能传回地球。
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.
来源：Newcomer 新闻长文 · newcomer.co