NVIDIA officially goes extraterrestrial to absorb the power of the Sun

In an effort to curb the exponential demands of data centers to power artificial intelligence models, NVIDIA has backed a company that has a solution, and that solution is going off planet.

In a new blog post shared to the NVIDIA website, Team Green explains how it has backed the company Starcloud to create a new AI-equipped satellite that will be launched in low-Earth orbit, and be powered exclusively by the Sun.

Starcloud is a company dedicated to bringing state-of-the-art data centers to outer space, in a bid to solve the growing demand for data centers on Earth, which come with significant downsides such as energy consumption, cooling requirements, and the impact they have on Earth's environment.

Starcloud intends to solve, or at least mitigate the reliance on data centers by moving them to space where there is almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy, and the vacuum of space acts as an infinite heatsink. According to the CEO of Starcloud, Philip Johnston, "In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space," and that energy costs in space will be 10x cheaper than land-based options, even including the cost to launch the data center.

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NVIDIA's blog post states the Starcloud-1 satellite is about 60-kilograms in weight (132.28 lb), and is approximately the size of a small fridge. Despite its size, NVIDIA states that it offers 100x more powerful GPU compute than any previous-based operation. Starcloud is also a recent graduate of the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator plans to run Gemma, an open AI model from Google, in orbit, on H100 GPUs, showcasing that AI models can even run in space.