Building the First Data Centers in Space
About this episode
Philip Johnston discusses the journey of Starcloud in building data centers in space and the challenges faced along the way.
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since raised $200 million, hit a billion-dollar valuation just 17 months after YC demo day, and filed with the FCC to deploy 88,000 more satellites. In this episode, Philip walks us through their wild origin story, the engineering challenges behind the Starcloud-1, why they booked a SpaceX launch before they even knew what they were building, and how data centers in space make sense both economically and politically.
People in this episode
Guest: Philip Johnston
Topics covered
- data centers
- space technology
- startups
- engineering challenges
- artificial intelligence
- satellite deployment
Keywords
- data centers in space
- Starcloud
- Nvidia H100 GPU
- large language model
- SpaceX launch
- satellite deployment
- engineering challenges
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Starcloud, Nvidia, SpaceX
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