Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory
Notas do episódio
I went inside Starcloud’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, right outside of Seattle, to tour the $2.3B company building AI data centers in space.
Philip Johnston, CEO & Co-Founder led the tour, alongside technical features with Co-Founder & CTO Ezra Feilden, Co-Founder & Chief Engineer Adi Oltean, as well as Bailey Montaño, Miguel Rivera and Camilo Lopez from the engineering team.
Starcloud has raised $450M to put Nvidia GPUs, AI inference and eventually gigawatts of computing infrastructure into orbit. Its latest round was $250M, led by Manhattan West, with Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Benchmark and EQT. The team went from founding to orbit in 21 months. Starcloud 1 launched with the first Nvidia H100 in space. Starcloud 2 launches in January with 100x the power, and Starcloud 3 is designed to deploy up to 50 satellites per SpaceX Starship launch.
We cover the economics of orbital vs terrestrial data centers, the $500/kg launch cost threshold, SpaceX rideshare and Nvidia chips in space. We also get into liquid cooling and radiators, radiation and chip burn-in, edge inference for government customers and plans for an 88,000-satellite constellation.
We also go behind the scenes of spacecraft testing, including a rebuilt secondhand vibe table, plus laser fabrication and welding. We close with Philip’s take on SpaceX passing $100T and his mission to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri.
Philip Johnston: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston
Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea
Sourcery: https://x.com/sourceryy
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