American company builds 20 GW AI data center in space

Interesting Engineering reported on August 23 that Starcloud, a startup company headquartered in Washington, USA, raised an additional 250 million USD in an additional capital call, bringing the total valuation to 2.3 billion USD. The new funding will enable the company to develop a new computing infrastructure designed to handle in-orbit AI tasks. The latest funding round brings Starcloud's total capital since its founding in 2024 to $450 million, with new investors including Nvidia and Cisco Investments.

Starcloud is building data centers that house high-performance GPUs on satellites, with the goal of using infrastructure in space to support the rapidly growing computing needs of AI. The new capital will support future spacecraft manufacturing, engineering and launch operations as the company moves toward a large orbital computing network.

Starcloud's solution relies on moving data center hardware off Earth and into orbit. The company's first major test took place in November 2025, when the Starcloud-1 satellite carried the Nvidia H100 AI processing chip into space. The company said the mission demonstrated data center-grade computer hardware that can operate in orbit without cooling, radiation and power management issues.

Since then, Starcloud has trained the AI ​​model in space, running a version of Google Gemini in orbit, demonstrating its high-performance AI inference and tuning capabilities. The company is working with Nvidia to develop Space-1 Vera Rubin, a data center-grade AI supercomputer module specifically designed for extreme conditions outside Earth's atmosphere. According to Geekwire, this module will provide 25 times more AI computing power than the H100 chip in space conditions.

Unlike data centers on the ground, systems operating in orbit cannot rely on conventional air cooling methods. Instead, they use heatsinks to transfer heat, and computer components need to be protected from radiation. Starcloud's satellite will serve as an initial platform for testing computer hardware suitable for space operations, using data from the Starcloud-1 mission to improve future systems.

According to W Media, Starcloud is asking the US Federal Communications Commission for a license to operate a super constellation of 88,000 satellites with 20 GW of computing capacity for AI tasks and many other applications. They are also building a 9,290 square meter manufacturing facility to produce the next generation Starcloud-3 spacecraft.