A Redmond Startup Is Sending Data Centers Into Orbit

AI data centers are springing up all over the country, including right here in Washington state. They are expensive to build, and they are really expensive to run because they use a lot of electricity. That's one of the reasons why Eastern Washington is so popular right now with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. 

There's plenty of room; energy is relatively inexpensive, and County governments are willing to offer tax breaks. 

But what if there's a better alternative in the future? 

An aerospace startup based in Redmond called Starcloud wants to help make that happen. 

According to msn.com,
‘Starcloud, a startup based in Redmond, Washington, wants to see if the world can move data centers into orbit. These centers power nearly everything online, from streaming to AI tools. Shifting them into space could help reduce pollution, save resources and speed up computing for everyone.’ 

Starkcloud has sent a satellite about the size of a refrigerator into space, carrying an NVIDIA H100 GPU, a processor that's about 100 times more powerful than any current chip floating around in space. Yes, it will be able to process enormous amounts of data very quickly and what they will be using it for in this experiment is to study images of Earth to watch the weather, track wildfires, and watch crops. 

Satellites are doing this now and then sending the data back to Earth to be processed there. The idea with the Starcloud 1 satellite is to look at the images, process them in orbit, and then send the results to Earth, which would potentially be much quicker. They will also be testing a google language model called gemma which will make this the first time that a so-called “large AI model” will be tested in space. (That's not frightening at all.) 

There are some huge advantages to locating large AI servers in space. You have abundant energy from the sun, and cooling is not a problem because in vacuum of space it is extremely cold.  

What does Starcloud want to achieve? 

Star Cloud's goal is to site a data center in space (Starcloud 2) that would be about 13,000 feet across. (I imagine that it includes solar panels.) It would be capable of handling massive AI workloads and have a power capacity of up to five gigawatts. 

At the speed that the private space industry seems to be growing, Starcloud believes that we could have large scale spaceborne data centers sometime in the 2030’s. 

If this is actually achieved, it will certainly change the definition of “My data is in the cloud.” 

Having watched Terminator movies multiple times, I'm not concerned at all about putting a gigantic AI data center in orbit around the Earth. No problem at all. 

A supercomputer chip going to space could change life on Earth
Space data centers could make cloud computing services faster and greener | Fox News