Inside The Startup Launching AI Into Space

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This moment right here, Starcloud 1, separation confirmed.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:04)
Could represent the birth of an entirely new industry, data centers in space.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:08)
The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space, and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter Starcloud.

**Philip Johnston** (0:16)
This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:21)
They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.

**Philip Johnston** (0:31)
I can see why it seems like a long shot to some people. To me though, the reason for doing this is that the potential impact is absolutely massive. So even if you think there's a small percentage chance of it working, then it's worth taking this kind of risk.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:52)
Philip Johnston and his team at Starcloud recently made aerospace history when they launched a satellite into orbit carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU.

**Philip Johnston** (1:01)
This is the first time anybody's tried to launch data center-grade terrestrial earth-based GPUs into space. It's gonna be the first of many.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:10)
While it's essentially a prototype, it's still 100 times more powerful than any computer that's ever operated in the vacuum of space. To find out how they went from an idea to launching a demo satellite in less than two years, we visited Starcloud's HQ in Redmond, Washington. Tell us about what Starcloud is working on.

**Philip Johnston** (1:29)
We are building data centers in space, initially to provide GPU compute to other satellites, and then later to compete on energy cost even with terrestrial data centers.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:38)
Starcloud's goal is to build the world's first orbital data centers. Massive GPU clusters powered by constant solar energy to run AI compute at scale. Operating in a sun-synchronous orbit, they'll draw uninterrupted sunlight for energy, radiate heat into deep space, and run with zero fresh water and much lower carbon emissions than data centers down here on Earth. By taking the cloud off Earth, Starcloud can scale almost indefinitely, free from land, grid and cooling limitations, and ultimately compete with the cost of the largest terrestrial data centers. Tell us more about how far along you are.

**Philip Johnston** (2:16)
We started about a year and a half ago. We've designed, built and tested our first satellite. That will be the first satellite that will have an H100 from Nvidia on board. The purpose of this is really to prove that our thermal management and radiation shielding techniques allow us to operate the state of the art in space. We're going to be running a whole bunch of demonstration workloads on that. We'll be the first to run Gemini from Google on there. We'll be the first to do fine tuning of model and training a model in space.

**Aaron Epstein** (2:40)
Why data centers in space? It seems like people are still struggling to get the compute that we need here, building them on earth. Why is space going to be the next frontier for that?

**Philip Johnston** (2:50)
Yeah, so we see a world where almost all data centers, anything that doesn't require very low latency, is operating in space, surely because of the constraints we're facing on energy terrestrially. And so we're building, with a vision to build extremely large, full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship Halo Bay.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:10)
And if this works, what does the world look like?

**Philip Johnston** (3:12)
It takes a huge burden off the grid on earth. Both the grid and the water supply. The way that data centers on earth keep cool is, essentially, they evaporate lots of fresh water. This is actually causing huge problems in certain parts of the US where they're just sucking the rivers and the lakes dry in order to keep these data centers cool. Our data centers in space require zero fresh water. Instead of being this evaporation process, our heat sink is infrared radiation into deep space. And so we're building these very large radiators that we run a fluid through but doesn't go anywhere.
And then that dissipates heat out into the vacuum of space.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:47)
What led you to ultimately starting Starcloud and being co-founder here?

**Ezra Feilden** (3:51)
We're seeing an absolute tidal wave of demand for energy, primarily for data centers, but also broadly electrification within our society. And in the Western world, we're not that good at building large infrastructure projects quickly.

**Adi Oltean** (4:04)
Our vision is to put larger and larger satellites in space and prove that this concept works. We can put essentially high-compute devices in space that are going to help our customers.