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Starcloud’s newest funding round sets the company’s value at $1.1 billion. This makes it one of the quickest startups to become a unicorn after completing Y Combinator. The company’s Series A finished 17 months after its demo day. Benchmark and EQT Ventures led the round. This shows that there is interest in moving data centers to space because there are issues with resources and politics that slow down building them on Earth.
Starcloud has raised $200 million and launched its first satellite with an Nvidia H100 GPU in November 2025. This year, the company will launch a stronger version, Starcloud 2, with several GPUs, including an Nvidia Blackwell chip and an AWS server blade, plus a bitcoin mining computer.
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The company will start making a data center spacecraft that can launch from Starship. Starship is a heavy lift rocket being made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The spacecraft is called Starcloud 3. It will have 200 kilowatts of power and weigh three tons. It will use the “pez dispenser” system that SpaceX created to drop Starlink satellites from Starship.
CEO and founder Philip Johnston said techcrunch that “he expects that will be the first orbital data center that is cost-competitive with terrestrial data centers, with costs on the order of $.05 per kw/hour of power — if commercial launch costs land around $500 per kilogram.
The challenge is that Starship isn’t flying yet; Johnston says he expects commercial access to open up in 2028 and 2029. That’s the reality facing all the big space data center projects: powerful space computers will be cost-prohibitive until a new generation of rockets starts launching at a high operational cadence, something that might not happen until the 2030s.
“If it ends up being delayed, we’ll just carry on launching the smaller versions on Falcon 9,” Johnston said. “We’re not going to be competitive on energy costs until Starship is flying frequently.”
“There’s kind of two business models,” Johnston explains: One is selling processing power to other spacecraft on orbit; the company’s first satellite, for example, analyzes data collected by Capella Space’s radar spacecraft. Then, in the future when launch costs go down, more powerful distributed data centers could potentially pull work from their terrestrial counterparts.
Johnston argues that starcloud is well ahead of the competition, with the first terrestrial GPU deployed in orbit. It was used to train an AI model in orbit, a first, according to Starcloud, and run a version of Gemini. Beyond the performance, Johnston says Starcloud now has valuable data about what it takes to run a powerful chip in space.
“An H100 is probably not the best chip for space, to be honest, but the reason we did it is we wanted to prove that we could run state of the art terrestrial chips in space,” he told TechCrunch. That hard-won knowledge —another GPU, an Nvidia A6000, failed during launch — will influence future designs.
There is a laundry list of technical challenges to be solved, including efficient power generation and cooling the hot-running chips. Starcloud-2 will have the largest deployable radiator flown on a private satellite; he expects at least two additional versions of that spacecraft will head to orbit, Johnston said.
Then there is the problem of synchronization. Big datacenter tasks, like training, need hundreds or thousands of GPUs to work together. Doing this in space will need either huge spacecraft or strong and dependable laser links between spacecraft flying close together. Most companies working on this expect those big tasks to come a long time after easier tasks are done in orbit.
Starcloud, Aetherflux, Google’s Project Suncatcher, and Aethero are all working on space data center businesses. Aethero launched Nvidia’s first space-based Jetson GPU in 2025. The big issue is SpaceX. They have asked the U.S. government for permission to make and use a million satellites for computing in space. Going head-to-head with SpaceX is a daunting task for any entrepreneur, but Johnston sees room for coexistence.
“They are building for a slightly different use case than us,” he told TechCrunch. “They’re mainly planning on serving Grok and Tesla workloads. It may be at some point that they offer a third party cloud service, but what I think they are unlikely to do is what we’re doing [as] an energy and infrastructure player.”
