China backs orbital data center startup with $8.4 billion in credit lines
HELSINKI - A Beijing-based space startup has secured early-stage funding and extensive credit backing as part of a broader Chinese push toward space-based computing infrastructure.
Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Co., Ltd., also known as Orbital Chenguang, announced the completion of a Pre-A1 funding round April 20. The round saw participation from venture and industrial investors including Haisong Capital, CITIC Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital, InnoAngel Fund, Anhui Xinhua Group, Zhike Industrial Investment, Kunlun Capital, and Lizhe Fund. The company did not disclose the value of the Pre-A1 round of equity financing in its statement.
At the same time, Orbital Chenguang said it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling 57.7 billion yuan ($8.4 billion) from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of Communications, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and CITIC Bank, among others.
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While such credit agreements typically represent potential financing rather than committed capital, the scale of the backing and players involved points to strong institutional support for the company's plans, which sits within a broader ecosystem.
Orbital Chenguang is incubated by the Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's municipal science and technology commission and the Zhongguancun Science Park administration. The institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations from across the industrial chain. Zhang Shancong acts as both director of the Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology and chief scientist at Orbital Chenguang. The company thus appears to represent a commercial node within a broader state-backed effort to develop space-based data center infrastructure.
Zhang described the rationale for the constellation at a November briefing. "Large-scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide, but further growth faces major obstacles, including heavy land use, soaring energy consumption and limits on atmospheric cooling," China Daily reported Zhang as saying.
Chinese-language Science and Technology Daily reported in November that Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology is planning a constellation in dawn-dusk orbit about 700-800 kilometers above the Earth, aiming to achieve a large-scale space data center to support space-based computing by 2035. The space data center is reported to have a power capacity exceeding 1 gigawatt.
The orbit, which is a particular type of Sun-synchronous orbit, offers near-continuous solar power and the passive cooling of the space thermal environment, theoretically enabling data center workloads at a scale impractical on the ground, though significant challenges such as thermal management remain.
An initial phase, spanning 2025-2027, will focus on core technological challenges and a first computing constellation launch phase, followed by integrating Earth-based data processing with space-based computing power between 2028-2030. An experimental satellite, Chenguang-1, was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 2026, but does not appear to have launched, though a number of undisclosed satellites were lost on the Ceres-2 and Tianlong-3 debut flights this year.
The effort appears to resonate with several strategies noted by China's main space contractor and the wider central government emphasis on and support for commercial space. In January, CASC, laying out plans for the five years ahead and citing alignment with China's 15th Five-Year Plan, proposed a gigawatt-scale space-based computing infrastructure, envisioning an integrated cloud-edge-terminal architecture in orbit. With China moving to integrate commercial space into national planning frameworks late last year, CASC may act as a strategic coordinator for a broader ecosystem of commercial and state-linked actors, rather than initiating a single, monolithic project.
While not stated clearly, the gigawatt-level nature of the constellation suggests a constellation could number in the thousands or more, depending on satellite power capacity. China is working to boost its fleet of launchers and attain reusability while expanding spaceports in order to construct the Guowang and Thousand Sails constellations, but is already looking beyond these projects. In December, China made filings with the International Telecommunication Union for two constellations each covering 96,714 satellites. No detailed deployment plans were disclosed, but the filings signal an effort to secure spectrum and orbital resources for potential future megaconstellations. There is no clear evidence the data center initiative is directly linked to these filings.
Space-based data centers are being pursued globally, with projects including Google's Suncatcher and a SpaceX vision for a constellation of one million satellites. Data centers in space are also seen to face challenges in terms of physics, such as thermal management and data transmission, and economics, including launch and systems costs.
Orbital Chenguang is not the only Chinese space computing effort. ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab launched 12 satellites for the edge-computing Three-Body constellation in May 2025. Shanghai Bailing Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd., recently received early stage funding of tens of millions of yuan, and plans to launch a demonstration satellite later this year as it works towards 100 kW-class computing satellites. Zhongke Tiansuan, or Comospace, also has its Aurora 1000 computing technology aboard a Jilin-1 satellite.
These developments indicate a strong interest in in-space computing in China, with Orbital Chenguang securing strong institutional backing to attempt to tackle the technical and economic challenges of making orbital data centers a reality.
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