Eric Schmidt lands in Appleton the week Relativity Space eyes orbital data centers

Eric Schmidt flew from Appleton International Airport to a private airstrip in Wisconsin on May 18, 2026, a 1-hour-41-minute hop in his Gulfstream G650ER (N652WE) that burned roughly 560 gallons of jet fuel and emitted about six metric tons of CO₂, according to flight data.

The same week, Schmidt is advancing his most audacious bet yet: using Relativity Space, the launch company he acquired in early 2025, to put large-scale AI data centers into orbit. As Ars Technica reported in May, Schmidt told a House committee that AI’s energy demand is a “crisis” and confirmed on social media that Relativity’s Terran R rocket is central to his space-based computing plans. Appleton sits near the Fox Valley, a region with growing tech infrastructure and potential launch-support facilities.

Schmidt, whose net worth hovers around $26 billion, has logged some of the highest private-jet CO₂ emissions in 2023 and 2024. This flight continues a pattern of domestic hops between his distributed properties and business interests, but the Wisconsin destination aligns with a new chapter: building the hardware to solve AI’s power problem from above.