October 23, 2025
In a landmark move for the tech industry, Crusoe Systems has announced a partnership with Starcloud to deploy computing infrastructure in space, with plans to offer limited GPU capacity from orbit by early 2027.
The initiative will begin with a technology demonstration aboard the Starcloud-1 satellite, scheduled for launch in November of this year. The 60kg satellite, roughly the size of a small refrigerator, will be equipped with an Nvidia H100 GPU to trial the concept of space-based computation. Following an 11-month mission in a 325km orbit, the satellite, built on Astro Digital’s Corvus-Micro bus, is designed to de-orbit and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Should this initial test prove successful, the long-term vision is far more ambitious. The companies have outlined a future goal of constructing significantly larger data centers in space, including a proposed 5-gigawatt data center satellite powered by a four-square-kilometer solar array. The specific scale of Crusoe's planned deployment with Starcloud has not yet been disclosed.
The partnership was hailed by leaders from both companies as a pivotal step forward. "Having Crusoe as the foundational cloud provider on our platform is a perfect alignment of vision and execution," said Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud. "Crusoe's expertise in building rugged, efficient, and scalable computing solutions makes them the ideal partner to pioneer this new era. Together, we are building not just a data center in space, but a new category of cloud computing."
Cully Cavness, Co-founder, President, and COO of Crusoe, emphasized the energy benefits of the endeavor. "At Crusoe, we believe that space will ultimately matter to the future of computing because it enables new solutions to a key scaling constraint for AI infrastructure, which is sourcing abundant, consistent, and clean energy," Cavness stated.
The announcement coincides with reports that Crusoe has secured $1.4 billion in a funding round led by Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at approximately $10 billion.
Crusoe and Starcloud join a growing list of entities exploring off-world computing. Other companies with similar ambitions include Axiom Space, NTT, Ramon.Space, and Sophia Space. Earlier this year, startup Lonestar successfully landed a small data center on the Moon, and earlier this month, Amazon's Jeff Bezos speculated about gigawatt-scale data centers in space within a decade.
SOURCE DCD
