US startup plans huge satellite fleet for space-based AI computing

Starcloud, a Nvidia-backed startup based in Redmond, Washington, has filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a massive constellation of up to 88,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. These satellites are intended to serve as orbital data centers specifically designed to process artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in space, aiming to overcome terrestrial data center limitations such as land scarcity, energy constraints, and cooling challenges. Operating in sun-synchronous orbits between 600 and 850 kilometers altitude, the satellites would harness nearly continuous solar power to run onboard AI computing hardware and use optical inter-satellite links to transfer data among themselves and connect with existing broadband satellite networks like Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and Blue Origin’s Tera Wave. The proposed constellation would be significantly larger than current satellite networks, including SpaceX’s Starlink (about 10,000 satellites), though smaller than SpaceX’s separate plan for up to one million satellites for orbital computing. Starcloud