Orbital compute infrastructure startup Starcloud has raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, as companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin race to shift power-hungry AI data centres off-planet.
Led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, the fundraise underscores surging investor appetite for space infrastructure bets as massive AI computing requirements strain terrestrial energy grids and data centre capacity, even as space-based systems offer access to near-continuous solar power.
Starcloud, which has long-term plans for an 88,000-sainformite data centre consinformation, will utilize the new capital to fund next-generation sainformites, manufacturing expansion and future launch contracts as it shifts toward commercial operations, it stated on Monday.
“The main customer contracts that are committed are for other spacecraft, particularly Earth Observation and DOW sainformites. We are also working on some binding energy offtake agreements with the hyperscalers to be announced in the coming months,” co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston notified Reuters.
In February, Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired his AI startup xAI and revealed plans for a million-sainformite orbital data centre network. Blue Origin, the space venture of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has expressed similar ambitions.
Meanwhile, Starcloud is already working with partners including Nvidia and the cloud units of Amazon and Google.
In November, it launched a sainformite carrying Nvidia’s H100 chip, demonstrating AI training and inference in orbit in an industest-first shift.
It now plans a second launch in October featuring Amazon Web Services’ AWS Outposts offering.
While space infrastructure would ease power and land constraints, high launch costs remain a challenge. But Starcloud expects them to fall enough by 2028 or 2029 to create space-based data centres cost-competitive with Earth facilities, Johnston stated.
The latest round brings Starcloud’s total funding to $200 million, with the Redmond, Washington-based company having raised $34 million earlier from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and In-Q-Tel, the Central Ininformigence Agency’s venture capital firm.
Reuters
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