The race to solve AI’s energy problem is moving beyond Earth. Starcloud, a startup building orbital data centres for AI inference, has raised $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, one of the greatest early‑stage bets yet on space‑based computing infrastructure.
The round was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, with new investors including Macquarie Capital, Seven Seven Six, Manhattan West, Adjacent, Carya, GSBackers, Link Ventures, Harpoon, New Vista Capital, and angel investor Kevin Johnson, a Goldman Sachs board member.
Existing backers, including NFX, Y Combinator, FUSE, Soma Capital, 3C AGI Partners, and Nebular, also participated. Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta will join Starcloud’s board.
The capital will be used to develop Starcloud’s third satellite, with the long‑term goal of making space‑based AI inference cost‑competitive with ground‑based data centres.
AI’s energy problem is becoming a space opportunity
As demand for AI compute accelerates, energy constraints are becoming one of the industry’s most pressing structural challenges. Training and running large‑scale models requires enormous and growing power draw, placing strain on terrestrial grids and driving up infrastructure costs for hyperscalers and emerging AI labs alike.
Starcloud was founded in 2024 by Adi Oltean, Philip Johnston and Ezra Feilden with a bold thesis: that orbital infrastructure can offload AI workloads from an increasingly strained energy grid. Rather than competing with cloud providers on price alone, the company is positioning space as a fundamentally different compute layer..
The company recently deployed Starcloud‑1, its debut satellite, which it claims was the first to carry an NVIDIA H100 GPU into space. The company also states it has trained a large language model in orbit — a milestone, if confirmed, that would mark a significant step in the viability of space‑based AI workloads.
These milestones follow a $21 million seed round in late 2024, which supported the launch of its first satellites. Starcloud graduated from Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch and has received backing from In‑Q‑Tel, the NVIDIA Inception Program, and the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers programme, further underscoring the strategic credibility of its approach.
