Lumen Orbit closes eight-figure, oversubscribed seed round of over $10 million. A source close to the details was used for this report. It would be one of the hottest deals-or, actually, the hottest deal of the most recent Y Combinator batch.

The startup based in Redmond, Washington is working on a moonshot idea related to creating a network of data centers in space that could potentially scale up to a gigawatt capacity and could be used in training large AI models. Lumen Orbit declined to comment.

YC's 2024 summer batch saw the company pass through. The VCs currently interested in it told TechCrunch that a lot of attention was brought on. The process was really very competitive in terms of the deal that the seed round of the startup had to go through.

Even while Lumen has such an ambitious mission, the company is already making such notable progress. A company founded this year, Lumen plans to launch its demonstrator satellite in 2025 in partnership with Nvidia's Inception program.

Not surprising is that the interest was high for a company that wanted to build data centers in space. And now companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are signing deals with nuclear power plants because there is such a big scramble to power AI. Data centers are expected to consume 9% of all overall energy consumption in the U.S. by 2030.

Lumen isn't the only firm trying to solve this potential data center crisis, and it isn't the only company ready to take that issue out there into the great beyond. Another is Lonestar Data Holdings, which has raised $5.8 million in order to construct data centers on the moon.

The consumer adoption of these companies is going to be hard, the venture capitalists told TechCrunch, no matter what the data center solution is. The VCs do like the bet, however, on the companies with original solutions to big problems.

That Lumen was founded in January by Philip Johnston, CEO; Ezra Feilden, CTO; and Adi Oltean, chief engineer. The startup had raised earlier, a $2.4 million pre-seed round in March led by Nebular with participation from Everywhere Ventures, Tiny VC and Sequoia among others.