Orbital Chenguang Space Data Center, also known as Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Co., enters the market with impressive $8.4 billion in funding in a Pre-A1 round. The Chinese government sees a rise in USA-based space data center Companies like Axiom Space, Google, and Starcloud, etc. Are gaining leads in this sector.
The round was completed on 20 April, and the company has not disclosed the valuation at which this amount was given. One thing is clear: China will no longer be left behind in this data center race.
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Orbital Chenguang Investor Details
This company is backed by venture capitalists and industrial investors, including Zhike Industrial Investment, CITIC Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital, and Lizhe Funds.
Zhang Shancong is the director of the Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology, and it at important position in Orbital Chenguang. This will increase investors’ willingness to invest more in such a project.
The total cost of this funding is 57.7 billion Yuan, which is $8.4 billion. The amount was given as a credit line, which comprises 12 major financial institutions, including the Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Bank of Communications, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank.
Beijing’s municipal science and technology commission and the Zhongguancun Science Park administration backed the Beijing Astro-future Institute of Space Technology. This company incubated many companies in the space sector, including Orbital Chenguang.
Orbital Chenguang Challenge US
The Chinese government has taken this project to the next level, as a US company was attracted by a global company. The funding they received is seen as part of China’s tech sovereignty mission.
This massive funding will develop the ecosystem that will certainly lead to new industries in the country. Since COVID-19, China and the USA have locked horns in the tech sector, and many believe this massive funding is part of this rivalry. This will also solve many territorial data center problems, such as water and land acquisition.
Most of the Chinese population lives in the eastern part of the country, where land acquisition is a problem, while the western parts have the Gobi Desert, which makes life tough. Acquiring land is highly expensive, as data center costs have increased significantly, and water is scarce in some Chinese cities.
On Feb 6, 2026, a Chinese government space sector company announced a 5-year plan to gain an edge in this technology.
By 2030, China intends to create an orbital “Space Cloud” powered by large-scale solar hubs. This will shift AI processing from Earth to orbit, which requires high energy.
This funding will challenge investors like Elon Musk, who actively develop or invest in this sector. Recently, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-3 model runs on an orbital data center, but the scale of this mission is very small. Once these run and start processing data on a large scale in space, these businesses will attract global investors.
Today, the world looks only to US companies because they are highly visible in the news, but the large-scale production of Orbital Chenguang Space data centers will drive massive revenue growth and change the company’s perception. China’s backbone is data they have due to their large population, and they will integrate data to train new LLMs.
Another reason is the cost of solar manufacturing and the technological advances in solar systems. Since China is known for large-scale production, they start building solar panels, and this will lead to overproduction. The company starts dumping these panels in other countries, and as time flies, they keep updating the tech behind them. Since these panels will be used in Orbital Chenguang Space data centers at a very low cost, they will save on launch costs.
Orbital Chenguang Long Term Plan
Orbital Chenguang has a long-term plan to have a gigawatt-scale space data center by 2035. This space data center is a constellation of many nodes and has an altitude of around 700-800 km. This will take almost 10 years, but the most important thing is that they challenge the US companies on the global stage.
The plan is divided into 3 phases
- 2025–2027: They launch multiple satellites and try to improve the hardware and software parts of Orbital Chenguang space data center. China has specialised in engineering and processes large amounts of critical minerals. Most of the world’s critical minerals are processed or refined in mainland China. In addition to that, they have multiple launchpads to send their component very fast, unlike the US, where they were highly dependent on other partners for that.
- 2028–2030: Unlike US companies like Kappler Communication, China doesn’t have that capability till date. This will take almost 3- 4 years to grow at that level. They will link space-based systems with Earth-based data centers till 2030.
- 2030–2035: Once Orbital Chenguang space data center completes the process, it will scale toward large infrastructure.
Orbital Chenguang Carbon Credit
Orbital Chenguang carbon credit is something that the internet is not buzzing about, but eventually, this will become the talk of the town. China is the biggest carbon emitter in the world, and a very large amount of CO2 is emitted as most of the data centers use thermal power plants for their electricity demand.
The International Energy Agency already warns of high electricity consumption due to the territorial data center. Some industry projections show demand could exceed Japan’s total electricity consumption.
The successful launch of a data center in space will credit carbon in these companies, which they will trade with other company specially with European countries.
Conculsion
Orbital Chenguang Space Data Center gets $8.4 billion in funding from various venture capitalists and industry experts. With this massive funding, they challenge US company like Starcloud, Axiom Space, etc. This funding is also synchronising with the Chinese government’s plan to have a gigawatt capacity in data center by 2035.
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