Starcloud raises $250M to build AI data centers in orbit
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher ● Covered by 2 sources
Starcloud just raised $250M to put AI data centers in orbit. It wants solar-powered chips in space, where there’s no night or weather to kill the power.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — read the original for the full story.
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Starcloud has pulled in $250 million more at a $2.3 billion valuation, a big follow-on to the Series A it announced in March. Manhattan West led the round, with more than a dozen other investors joining in, including Nvidia and Cisco Investments.
The startup isn’t building ordinary data centers. It wants to move AI computing off Earth and into orbit, where solar panels can keep working without the nightly drop you get on the ground and without storms blocking sunlight. Starcloud also argues that space avoids the cooling headaches that come with terrestrial facilities.
The company has already pushed one Nvidia graphics card into orbit on a small satellite and says that hardware completed the first orbital AI training run. Its next step is Starcloud-2, set for 2027. That system is supposed to carry AI chips, storage and a backup module, and handle both training and inference. Starcloud says it will also let the company process sensor data in orbit instead of sending raw feeds down first.
From there, the plan gets much larger. Starcloud says it wants to build two more satellite generations after Starcloud-2. Starcloud-3 would use graphics cards, cooling gear and heat-dissipation hardware, with a 200-kilowatt power footprint. Starcloud-4 is even more ambitious: a cylindrical structure tied to a 2.5-square-mile solar array, packed with container-like modules for liquid-cooled servers.
The money now goes toward manufacturing and launch bookings. Starcloud is building production lines for Starcloud-3 and using the new funding to reserve space on launch vehicles. It says its launch partner is SpaceX, which is developing its own AI satellite, AI1, with a 230-foot wingspan and similar computing capacity to Starcloud-3. SpaceX says it plans to start mass producing that satellite by the end of 2027.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is exactly the sort of moonshot that gets Silicon Valley talking and everyone else paying the electricity bill. Orbital compute sounds clever until you remember launch capacity, hardware reliability and the small matter of hauling a data center into space one piece at a time. The industry keeps selling “off-Earth” as a fix for on-Earth messes, which is very on-brand for AI.
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