Space computing startup
Appears in 3 stories · Last updated Nov 1, 2026
Flew an Nvidia H100 in orbit in 2025
On October 1, a Google prototype satellite rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 into low Earth orbit carrying four Tensor Processing Units, the chips Google builds for machine learning. After about three weeks of checking out its subsystems, the spacecraft took a prompt from the ground on October 30: a chip running Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model wrote a haiku about being in space, downlinked as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway.
Updated Nov 1
As of August 2026: Raised $250 million to scale orbital data centers
A dorm-fridge-sized box carrying a single NVIDIA chip ran an AI model in space last year. On August 21, 2026, the startup behind it, Starcloud, said investors handed it $250 million to build something far bigger.
Updated Aug 22
As of May 2026: Operating first GPU-equipped satellite; planning second-generation constellation
Earth observation satellites generate petabytes of imagery every day, but only about two percent of it ever reaches the ground. The bottleneck is physics: a satellite in low Earth orbit gets maybe ten minutes of ground-station contact per pass, and radio bandwidth cannot keep up with sensor resolution that doubles every few years. Nvidia's answer, announced at its annual developer conference on March 17, 2026, is to stop trying to move the data down and instead move the AI up. The Vera Rubin Space-1 Module packs 25 times the compute power of Nvidia's H100 chip into a radiation-hardened package designed to run large language models and foundation models directly in orbit.
Updated May 30
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