Interview
Inside The Startup Launching AI Data Centers Into Space
- Philip Johnston projects that within approximately ten years, the majority of new data centers will be constructed in space to overcome terrestrial energy and land constraints.
- StarCloud aims to compete with the energy costs of the largest terrestrial facilities by operating massive orbital data centers powered by constant solar energy in sun-synchronous orbits, eliminating the need for fresh water and enabling heat dissipation into deep space.
- The company plans to scale operations almost indefinitely, eventually targeting massive five gigawatt facilities, with the current long-term vision excluding only low-latency requirements from space deployment.
- StarCloud is constructing large data centers designed to hold 40 megawatts of capacity, weighing roughly 100 tons, and fitting within a single Starship Halo Bay.
- The organization intends to launch a series of satellites to validate thermal management and radiation shielding, starting with a 60-kilogram satellite containing an NVIDIA H100 GPU, followed by a second launch in October of the next year carrying Blackwell architecture with ten times the first satellite's power.
- Upcoming demonstrations include running Google's Gemini model, fine-tuning AI models, and training models in space, alongside vibration testing of deployable structures and high-powered inference.
- Engineering efforts focus on developing extremely large, low-cost, low-mass deployable radiators to dissipate heat, with half of the engineering team dedicated to this component and a co-founder possessing a decade of experience in large deployable structures.
- Launch cost targets are set at $50 per kilogram for space-based solar energy transmission and $500 per kilogram for orbital data centers, with the company currently closer to the data center target; however, space-to-Earth solar transmission is noted to lose 95% of its energy.
- The company anticipates a potential 100 to 1,000 times increase in reusable rocket launch capacity, though it remains a decade away from its grand vision of massive five-gigawatt orbital data centers.
- StarCloud is currently building components in-house, contracting Astro Digital for the satellite bus, and is supported by a team that includes a PhD in engineering, while competitors like Google, SpaceX, and Amazon also explore orbital data centers.