Starcloud is a US start-up founded in 2024 that aims to build data centers directly in Earth orbit. The idea: server satellites with their own solar panels are meant to process AI workloads where solar energy is available around the clock and waste heat can be radiated freely into the vacuum. This guide explains the concept, company history, previous milestones, and the planned next steps – the date at the top shows the last revision.
The concept: solar power and cooling without Earth’s atmosphere
Starcloud makes a simple argument: a satellite in the right orbit sees the sun almost constantly, so it needs neither battery storage nor a power grid. At the same time, waste heat can be radiated directly into the vacuum, without cooling towers or water. According to the company’s own figures, this cuts energy costs per computation by up to ninety percent compared with a comparable data center on the ground. On top of that, approval processes for land, grid connections, and cooling water in orbit fall away, which is meant to speed up the rollout of new capacity. This calculation is a self-reported figure from the company and depends heavily on the launch costs of the rocket used.
From Lumen Orbit to Starcloud: founding and funding
The company was founded in January 2024 in El Segundo, California, initially under the name Lumen Orbit. The three founders bring relevant experience: CEO Philip Johnston came from McKinsey with satellite projects, CTO Ezra Feilden spent ten years researching satellite materials, and Chief Engineer Adi Oltean previously worked as a principal engineer on Starlink tracking at SpaceX and spent twenty years on GPU clusters at Microsoft. In March 2025 the company renamed itself Starcloud following a legal dispute with the telecom company Lumen Technologies. Funding grew in several steps: a roughly $10 million seed round through the Y Combinator accelerator in summer 2024 was followed in March 2025 by a roughly $24 million follow-on round with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, In-Q-Tel, and NFX as investors. In March 2026, Starcloud raised $170 million in a Series A led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures at a $1.1 billion valuation – just seventeen months after its Y Combinator demo day, one of the fastest paths to unicorn status in the industry.
Starcloud-1 brings a modern AI GPU to space for the first time
In November 2025, the satellite Starcloud-1 launched, a roughly sixty-kilogram device about the size of a small refrigerator. On board is an Nvidia H100 graphics card, according to the company the first data-center-class GPU of this generation in orbit and about a hundred times more powerful than earlier space computing hardware. In December 2025, Starcloud reported running an AI model in orbit for the first time: the satellite ran inference with Google’s open Gemma model and additionally trained the small nanoGPT model built by former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy directly on board. In parallel, Starcloud-1 analyzed radar data from Earth-observation company Capella Space to show that practical workloads can be processed in orbit too.
Crusoe partnership and plans for a giant constellation
As early as October 2025, cloud provider Crusoe announced a partnership with Starcloud to become the first operator of publicly accessible cloud capacity in space. A joint satellite carrying a Crusoe cloud module is set to launch in late 2026, with limited GPU capacity for customers announced for early 2027. For the successor Starcloud-2, the company points to Nvidia Blackwell accelerators and AWS server components, while a larger craft called Starcloud-3, rated at around 200 kilowatts, is designed for launches on SpaceX’s Starship rocket. In February 2026, Starcloud filed an application with the US FCC for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, aiming to deliver up to five gigawatts of combined compute capacity long term. That figure is a planning target from the filing and far exceeds the hardware actually launched so far. Worth noting: Starcloud is not a SpaceX subsidiary but an independent, Nvidia-backed start-up – even though both companies pursue similar concepts and Starcloud says it relies on SpaceX launch vehicles.
Whether Starcloud reaches its own goal – making Starcloud-3 in particular cost-competitive with ground-based data centers – remains open. CEO Philip Johnston has publicly acknowledged that this economics depends on frequent, low-cost Starship launches; if that doesn’t happen, he says Starcloud will keep launching smaller satellites on the established Falcon 9 rocket.
