Key Takeaways

  • Orbital Chenguang completed a Pre-A1 funding round with backing from multiple Chinese venture and industrial investors.
  • The company secured 57.7 billion yuan in strategic credit lines from 12 major financial institutions.
  • The financing supports a state-linked push to build gigawatt-scale space-based computing infrastructure by 2035.

Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Co., Ltd., better known as Orbital Chenguang, has moved a step closer to its ambitious goal of building space-based data centers. On April 20 the company closed a Pre-A1 funding round with participation from Haisong Capital, CITIC Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital, InnoAngel Fund, Anhui Xinhua Group, Zhike Industrial Investment, Kunlun Capital, and Lizhe Fund. The company kept the size of the equity round confidential, which has become fairly common among early-stage players working on sensitive or strategically aligned space projects.

Here is the thing that really drew attention. Alongside the equity round, Orbital Chenguang disclosed that it obtained 57.7 billion yuan in strategic credit lines from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of Communications, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and CITIC Bank. Credit lines do not equal guaranteed investment, of course, but the sheer magnitude signals institutional confidence. It also aligns neatly with rising interest across China in in-orbit compute capacity.

The company sits within a broader ecosystem. Orbital Chenguang is incubated by the Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology, which has backing from Beijing's municipal science and technology commission and the Zhongguancun Science Park administration. The institute coordinates a consortium of 24 organizations that span the industrial chain. Zhang Shancong serves as both director of the institute and chief scientist at Orbital Chenguang, a dual role that further connects the commercial firm to state-linked strategic planning.

At a briefing last November, Zhang outlined the motivation. He argued that terrestrial data centers face constraints that are becoming harder to solve, citing land use, rising energy consumption and atmospheric cooling limits. Publications such as China Daily and Science and Technology Daily covered his remarks, explaining that the Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology is targeting a constellation in a dawn-dusk orbit around 700 to 800 kilometers altitude. The goal is to create a large-scale space data center by 2035 with a power capacity above 1 gigawatt.

This type of Sun-synchronous orbit provides long periods of solar illumination, plus a stable thermal environment that can help with passive cooling. In theory this opens the door to workloads that would be inefficient or nearly impossible to run on the ground. Thermal management still looms as a major engineering hurdle. Even so, the idea of offloading power-intensive computing tasks to space keeps gaining traction. One might ask whether an orbital data center can truly outcompete Earth-based hyperscale campuses once launch costs and maintenance are factored in. That debate is already unfolding across the industry.

The development roadmap is divided into phases. From 2025 to 2027, Orbital Chenguang plans to tackle core technologies and attempt its first computing constellation launch. The years 2028 to 2030 focus on integrating terrestrial data processing with orbital compute. Chenguang-1, an experimental satellite intended for late 2025 or early 2026, marks an upcoming milestone for testing the underlying architecture in orbit.

Another angle matters here. China's main space contractor, CASC, outlined a gigawatt-scale space-based computing infrastructure earlier this year as part of its alignment with China's 15th Five-Year Plan. CASC envisions a cloud-edge-terminal architecture in orbit. Given China's decision to formally integrate commercial space activities into national planning frameworks, CASC may become a coordinator for multiple actors rather than the sole executor of such large-scale programs. This multi-actor model mirrors patterns seen in other sectors, where government bodies seed ecosystems rather than build everything top to bottom.

The sheer scale of a gigawatt-level constellation suggests thousands of satellites or more, depending on per-satellite power output. China is already preparing for massive deployments with its Guowang and Thousand Sails constellations. Recent filings with the International Telecommunication Union also secured priority for spectrum and orbital resources for vast numbers of satellites, though detailed deployment plans were not publicly described. There is no verified link between those large-scale filings and the orbital data center initiative, although it is hard not to wonder whether they will eventually intersect.

Internationally, interest in in-space computing is picking up, with various aerospace companies exploring long-term visions that include large networks of computing satellites. These ideas face the exact same physics and economics challenges that orbital computing cannot escape. Thermal dissipation, radiation resilience, and high-throughput data transfer remain tough problems even for organizations with enormous resources.

Back inside China, Orbital Chenguang is not acting alone. Several other aerospace tech firms, such as ADA Space, Shanghai Bailing Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd., and Zhongke Tiansuan, have recently tested experimental edge-computing satellites or secured funding to develop high-performance computing spacecraft. Taken together, these developments point to a rapidly forming competitive field inside China's space sector.

Orbital Chenguang now holds both early equity backing and large financial commitments that could help it bridge the long and expensive gap between concept and hardware. The road to orbital data centers will not be simple, but with this level of institutional support the company stands out as one of the more serious contenders attempting to push computing beyond Earth's surface.