James Yang

$130B were invested into building data centers in the first three months of 2026; more than three times what the US spent on the Manhattan project. Current projections exceed $700B of total investment into this infrastructure in 2026 in the US alone. But less than a third of the pipeline is actually being built — largely because there aren't enough workers to meet the bottomless demand. Many of our EPC customers who build gigawatt scale solar farms are also the ones building these gigawatt scale data centers, and we’ve heard overwhelming demand for robots to help deploy these infrastructures. Over the last 10 days our engineers went from never having worked with cooling systems in data centers to building a working demo of the cooling pipe install application for our Cosmic-1 system. By swapping out the end effector of the robot and retraining our AI models, we were able to demonstrate detecting, picking, and installing large pipes that typically takes a crew of several workers on job sites. Cosmic-1 is built from the ground up to be general-purpose; just by adding training data to our pipeline it can learn to pick up practically any component on a job site and install it with millimeter accuracy. That approach generalizes well against both the long tail of edge cases for each task and for entirely new tasks without changing the system architecture. While we scale our fleet to satisfy solar construction demand, we’re excited to start working with our customers to accelerate the deployment of hundreds of gigawatts of data center demand. NYT article on data center investments: https://lnkd.in/gngbyZUh

General Astronautics builds autonomous robots for research and manufacturing in space. Microgravity changes what's physically possible. Novel pharmaceuticals are feasible as proteins crystallize with fewer defects. Semiconductors and optical fibers form without the flaws that gravity creates. Astronaut time is expensive, and there's not nearly enough of it. On the ISS, NASA estimates crew time at $130K per hour. On commercial stations, it's more than three times that. Crews have to sleep, rotate home, and pick and choose which experiments to run. General Astronautics is building robotic systems that handle laboratory work: pipetting, sample prep, plate handling, and reagent mixing, with the precision and autonomy to operate without crew. The goal is simple: make microgravity research and manufacturing scalable, not bottlenecked by how many people you can put in orbit. The team comes from SpaceX, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon. They've spent their careers on robotics, spacecraft systems, and the intersection of both. They started General Astronautics because the limiting factor in space was never science, it was the labor to do it. Congrats on the launch, Bram Schork! https://lnkd.in/gU2D2Qkb

There's a new credential in solar construction: Certified Robotic Installer. We're excited to announce Sunstall Inc. as our first partner that has achieved this designation. Close to two years in the making, this acknowledges the numerous hours of on-site utilization of our robotic equipment by the Sunstall team across multiple projects. This certification reflects their skill in maximizing productivity across the entire installation workflow—improving speed, quality, and consistency while helping address the industry's critical labor shortage. Thank you to the Sunstall team for being early adopters and true innovators. More to come!

Really appreciated the chance to join the UC Merced Roundtable on Agrivoltaics this week on behalf of Sunzaun - Vertical Solar. The smaller, roundtable format made for genuine, open conversations. Farmers, researchers, and industry partners shared real-world experiences and ideas about combining solar and agriculture. We were especially glad to hear from Hansjörg Vollmer, an orchard owner from Germany, who brought valuable insights from his work with agrivoltaic systems in European orchards. It’s exciting to see this kind of knowledge exchange taking root here in California, connecting people who are actively building the bridge between sustainable energy and productive farmland. #Agrivoltaics #Sustainability #UCMerced #SolarFarming #AgricultureInnovation #KnowledgeSharing

This is what the future of solar installation looks like! Human crews and robots working together quickly and efficiently, with robots tackling the dangerous, repetitive, and physically difficult work and humans focusing on high value and high dexterity tasks. Big thanks to Sunstall Inc. for collaborating with us on this project! Let’s continue to push the industry forward! #Cosmicrobotics #Sunstall #solar #construction #robotics

The future of construction is robotic. Power demand is exploding. AI data centers, reshoring manufacturing, electrification. It's all happening at once. Over the last couple decades, solar won with photovoltaic technology and policy. It made solar the fastest-to-deploy and cheapest new energy to the grid. But the gap between what we need to build and how we're building it gets wider every day. Crews in the field need all the help they can get. That is why Cosmic Robotics exists. To build tools to unlock essential progress on critical infrastructure. Cosmic-1A is a force multiplier. Handling the repetitive heavy lifting so crews can take on more critical tasks. Adaptive, reliable, and designed for the realities of the field. #solar #construction #constructiontech #energy #robotics #CosmicRobotics

"Learn how vertical solar installations are revolutionizing dual land use, creating windbreaks for crops, reducing water evaporation, and generating clean energy while allowing continued agricultural production. Our panelists will share real-world experiences from agrivoltaics projects, discuss the technical aspects of various racking systems, and explain how these solutions can help farmers diversify income while contributing to renewable energy goals. The discussion will cover practical applications for different farming scenarios, installation considerations, economic benefits, and current trends in this rapidly evolving field. Whether you're a farmer looking to maximize land value, a solar developer interested in agricultural partnerships, or an agricultural consultant seeking sustainable solutions, this webinar will provide valuable insights into how agrivoltaics can create a more sustainable future for both energy and food production." Registration Weblink: https://lnkd.in/g2D-pv2z

We started Cosmic Robotics with a simple belief: the future isn’t imagined — it’s built. Built by real people, with real tools, in the real world. Not in pitch decks. Not in renderings. Not in the cloud. Certainly not on social media. At Cosmic, we build those tools. Tools that work. Tools that adapt and perform. Tools that crews don’t just tolerate — they trust. We're early, but the work has already begun. Today, we get to share a small piece of where it starts 👇

Incredibly grateful and excited to announce our $4m pre-seed round and a feature on TechCrunch! https://lnkd.in/g-xDvibR Three open secrets led to me leaving my job designing rocket engines to start Cosmic Robotics, where we build AI and robotics to build critical infrastructures on Earth and eventually on Mars. #1: The US has an infrastructure crisis In the last several decades we’ve lagged behind on building pretty much everything and anything we need - and now the demand for housing, energy, transportation, compute, and so many other critical infrastructures are off the chart. In energy infrastructures alone we need to install enough solar panels to cover 1,000 football fields every single day for the next 10 years just to keep up with demand. #2: We are going to Mars in our lifetime I’ve worked at NASA, JPL, SpaceX, and Relativity Space - there is now sufficient talent, interest, and technical progress for a landing in the mid to late 2030’s. If we do this right, there’s invaluable science and research possible on Mars; from medicine and biology to engineering and even the social sciences. But the next bottleneck after rockets and space capsules was robots to build a livable city once we got there, which needs to be powered by… you guessed it, AI. #3: AI and robotics are more than hype When Tesla announced their humanoid robot in 2021, it felt completely out of left field. At the time, robotics was having a hard time doing anything practical beyond dumb factory robots that hadn’t changed much in 40 years and overhyped self-driving cars that seemed like a blackhole for investments. Was this a freak project or was something about to radically change? Sure enough the flood of AI and robotics developments in the last couple years have been astounding and there is genuinely incredible technical progress at breakneck speed. There’s also a lot of hype surrounding the whole thing - but in the same way the internet really did change the world after the dot-com bubble, AI and robotics are most definitely going to have a huge impact in the next several decades. Each of these insights alone would’ve been enough for me to rethink my life plans. But when all three aligned perfectly and I saw I was uniquely positioned to act on it, I couldn’t let myself live with a “what if” in the back of my mind. And it’s not just me… it seems insanely audacious missions attract the best talent out there and we’re starting to put together an absolutely cracked team. We’re just getting started - let’s go build the future.