Art by Clark MillerWhy Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos Are High On Space Data Centers
Soaring demand for electricity to power data centers is creating buzz around the idea of putting them into orbit, where they can tap into uninterrupted solar energy.
If all goes as planned in August, a startup called Starcloud from Redmond, Wash., will load a rocket bound for space with a refrigerator-sized satellite, the first to contain an Nvidia H100 chip. Normally, that chip is at the heart of the sprawling data centers back on Earth that run the latest artificial intelligence models.
Compared to existing data centers, the Starcloud satellite will be almost comically under-powered: It may have only enough computing muscle to run less demanding versions of Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT models, according to Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston. Still, the satellite will be the most powerful computer in orbit, with 100 times more processing power than the International Space Station and other satellites, according to Johnston, whose company raised $21 million out of Y Combinator in 2024, one of the year’s largest rounds from the incubator.
And, ultimately, Starcloud wants to build the first gigawatt-scale data center in space, with bays full of AI chips powered by a massive solar array spanning 4 kilometers by 4 kilometers.