Starcloud Raises $170 Million Series A to Build Space Data Centers

Space computing startup Starcloud raised a $170 million Series A round led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, growing into a unicorn company valued at $1.1 billion. The company has raised a total of $200 million to date.

In November 2025, Starcloud successfully launched its first satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 GPU. By the end of this year, it plans to launch Starcloud 2, a more powerful version that includes Nvidia Blackwell chips, an AWS server blade, and a bitcoin mining computer.

Going forward, the company is also pursuing development of Starcloud 3, a 200kW-class, 3-ton data center spacecraft optimized for launch on SpaceX's Starship. The goal is to achieve power costs cheap enough to compete with ground-based data centers once Starship's commercial operations stabilize.

The main business models are as follows:

• Providing computing power to other spacecraft in orbit (e.g., analyzing radar data for Capella Space)
• Operating distributed data centers that handle workloads from ground-based data centers as launch costs fall

However, technical challenges remain to be solved, including power generation and chip cooling issues, as well as securing high-performance laser link technology to synchronize thousands of GPUs.