Starcloud Announces Groundbreaking Space-Based AWS Deployment
February 10, 2026
The race to extend cloud and high-performance computing infrastructure beyond Earth has entered a significant new phase. Space data center startup Starcloud has announced a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy its Outposts hardware in orbit, marking a pivotal step in the commercialization of off-planet computing. This move underscores the growing industry belief that space offers unique advantages for powering the next generation of AI and cloud services, including near-constant solar power and radiative cooling.
According to a LinkedIn post by Starcloud's co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston on February 9, the company will be the first to launch AWS Outpost hardware to space. The deployment is scheduled for October of this year aboard Starcloud's second satellite. "I am excited to share that Starcloud will be the first to launch the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outpost hardware to space... further enabling high-performance computing in space!" Johnston stated. AWS Outposts are rack-scale systems that allow customers to run AWS infrastructure and services in their own facilities, bringing cloud capabilities to edge and on-premises locations.
This initiative builds upon Starcloud's previous technological demonstrations. In November 2025, the company launched a test satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 GPU, which later successfully ran queries on Google's Gemma large language model. The upcoming AWS Outposts mission represents a move from testing toward operational, scalable infrastructure. The long-term ambition, however, is far more expansive. Documents submitted to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal Starcloud's proposal for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites. This staggering number would dwarf the current population of approximately 14,500 active satellites orbiting Earth.
The proposed mega-constellation is designed to "train and operate artificial intelligence models and other cloud computing services," leveraging space's environment for greater energy efficiency and scalability than is possible with terrestrial data centers. This vision places Starcloud among several major players targeting the orbital computing market. SpaceX has filed plans for a million-satellite data center constellation, while Amazon's Project Kuiper and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are active in related low-Earth orbit communications. Google, through initiatives like 'Project Suncatcher,' and other firms including Axiom Space and NTT are also developing space-based data center technologies.
The successful deployment of AWS Outposts in space could significantly accelerate the viability of orbital data centers, providing a familiar cloud environment for developers while tapping into the theoretical benefits of space-based infrastructure. If realized, Starcloud's planned fleet of 88,000 satellites would represent a fundamental shift in where and how the world's most demanding computational workloads are processed, potentially reducing the terrestrial footprint and energy constraints associated with large-scale AI training and cloud services.
Source: datacenterdynamics
