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Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on Putting the First A.I. Data Center in Space

Philip Johnston’s Starcloud is chasing limitless solar energy in orbit to fuel A.I.’s exponential growth. But the idea also faces technical and regulatory challenges.

In November, a 60-kilogram satellite the size of a small refrigerator called Starcloud-1 streaked into low Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket carrying the first data-center-class GPU ever operated in space—an Nvidia H100 roughly 100 times more powerful than any prior orbital compute. Within weeks, Starcloud, the company making the satellite, announced it had trained a language model on the complete works of Shakespeare and had run Google’s Gemini from roughly 200 miles above Earth.

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“The spacecraft is performing better than we could have hoped for,” Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, told Observer. Johnston founded the Redmond, Wash. company in early 2024, backed by a conviction that has since attracted $200 million from investors, including Nvidia, In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator: Rather than build better infrastructure on Earth to satiate A.I.’s runaway energy appetite, move the infrastructure off of Earth entirely. Today (March 30), the company announced it raised a $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, helping it reach unicorn status in just 17 months (and the quickest to do so in Y Combinator’s history).

Johnston, 39, brings a distinctly financial pragmatism to the cosmos. Before pivoting to aerospace, Johnston served as an algorithmic trader at BNP Paribas, consulted for national space agencies at McKinsey and co-founded Opontia, an e-commerce aggregator that raised $46 million before being acquired.

A self-avowed space nerd, Johnston came upon the idea for Starcloud after a solo weekend trip to Starbase, the Texas city where SpaceX is headquartered, to see the Starship rocket. What struck him was across the road from the rocket: two gigafactories “similar to Tesla production lines,” he shared in a TED Talk in October, designed to each produce a new Starship every day. He went home, called his co-founders Ezra Feilden, a materials engineer he had grown up with in the U.K., and Adi Oltean, a former principal software engineer at SpaceX, and started running the numbers on what that launch capacity could enable. Data centers kept coming up as the answer.

Starcloud-1 is the first data........

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