By Gunjan Banerji and Nikki Walker

Baiju Bhatt became a billionaire building Robinhood Market with his college roommate Vlad Tenev. So why did he decide to start all over again?

He's betting big on space, and launched Cowboy Space Corp. after stepping back from the financial app in 2024. Cowboy Space is building solar-powered AI data centers in space, and was recently valued at around $2 billion.

Investors are hungry to get a piece of start-ups tied to space. Venture funding for U.S. space-technology firms excluding SpaceX shot up to $7.1 billion in 2025, almost triple the figure a year earlier. Last year's haul was the strongest since companies raised almost $4 billion in 2021. Read more about that here.

And there's a data center frenzy underway. Spending on data centers and other AI infrastructure by just four big tech companies this year is expected to top $670 billion-a larger investment as a share of the economy than the railroad expansion of the 1850s.

Watch my full interview with Bhatt here.

This item is part of a Wall Street Journal live coverage event. The full stream can be found by searching P/WSJL (WSJ Live Coverage).

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 24, 2026 04:09 ET (08:09 GMT)

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