Starcloud
"Data Centers in Space"
Starcloud (founded 2024, Redmond WA) launched Starcloud-1, the first satellite with an Nvidia H100 GPU, targeting gigawatt-scale orbital AI data centers.
Starcloud, Inc. is a space-based AI computing company headquartered in Redmond, Washington, founded in January 2024 in El Segundo, California under the name Lumen Orbit before relocating to Redmond in February 2024 and later rebranding as Starcloud. The company was founded by CEO Philip Johnston (formerly of McKinsey & Company), Chief Engineer Adi Oltean (formerly of SpaceX and Microsoft Azure), and CTO Ezra Feilden (formerly of Airbus Defence and Space). Starcloud's core proposition is building orbital data centers that use continuous solar power and radiative cooling in space to run GPU-based AI compute, with the company stating this approach could reduce electricity costs by roughly 90% compared to terrestrial data centers while avoiding land-based permitting constraints, ultimately aiming to scale to gigawatt-level compute capacity in orbit. In November 2025, Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU that the company describes as delivering roughly 100 times more powerful AI compute than had previously been placed in orbit. Following launch, Starcloud reported running versions of Google's Gemini and Gemma language models aboard the satellite and conducting in-orbit training of Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT model, which the company characterizes as the first large language model training performed in space. In February 2026, Starcloud filed a proposal with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites as part of its longer-term orbital data-center roadmap, which includes planned follow-on satellites Starcloud-2 through Starcloud-4. The company has raised approximately $34 million in seed funding by March 2025 and a $170 million Series A round in March 2026 that valued the company at roughly $1.1 billion, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and In-Q-Tel, and it has also received backing and GPU support from Nvidia. As of 2026 the company employed approximately 15 people, reflecting its early operating stage. Public reporting from mid-2026 has also noted that scaling orbital GPU operations beyond a single satellite remains an operational challenge, underscoring that space-based AI compute is still an early-stage, unproven infrastructure category rather than a mature commercial service. Starcloud has not published third-party certification information, and no official Facebook or YouTube company pages were identified during this review.
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Contact Starcloud
WEBSITE
https://www.starcloud.com/HEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2024
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
employees 10-50
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
Keywords
- Starcloud
- orbital data center
- space-based AI compute
- Nvidia H100
- satellite GPU
- in-orbit LLM training
- Starcloud-1
- radiative cooling
- space compute infrastructure
- Manufacturer
- System Integrator
- Compute & Chips
- Cloud & Data
- Aerospace & Space
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