Thanks so much for having me. My name is Philip Johnston and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, and just like the previous company, we have also been abusing GPUs in ways they were not designed for.
So yeah, we're building data centers in space, mainly for the energy that we can draw, and I will spend the next five minutes explaining why it will soon make much more sense to build data centers in space than it does to build them on Earth, and then I'll take five minutes for questions. So please start thinking of some questions. Before I do that though, I want to show a quick video, which is actually the deployment of Starcloud-1, and this had five NVIDIA GPUs on it, but the most significant was the NVIDIA H100 chip, and I'll just quickly play the video first.
Starcloud-1 separation confirmed.
So you don't normally get as great a deployment video, by the way. Half the time they'd like deploy it into the shadow. So the reason this was so significant is until this point, many people thought you actually couldn't run state-of-the-art terrestrial data center grade GPUs in space for two main reasons. One is the thermal dissipation, so they're very power dense, they produce a lot of heat, and the second is the radiation tolerance. So people thought that you would have bit flips at too high a rate. And so with this chip, we were the first to train a model in space. We actually trained nanoGPT from Andrej Karpathy, and then we also were the first to run a version of Gemini, the first to do high-powered inference on SAR data, so other satellite data. And so it was a very significant step in proving that we can actually run the state of the art terrestrially.
But yeah, I think maybe to make the case for why it will soon make more sense in terms of energy cost, I'd like to quickly draw a comparison with a solar project on Earth, since solar is the cheapest form of energy that we have on Earth. So if you want to build a solar project to power a new data center, you have three main costs. So the first is the cost of permitted land, and in fact in North America that's actually the largest cost, or can be, for most new solar projects. The second is the cost of battery storage and backup power, because we only have peak power for about four hours of the day, so we need to charge those batteries to use at night. And then the last is the cost of the solar cells themselves.
So how does that compare to building a similarly sized solar project in space? Well, in space, number one, we don't need to pay for permitted land, so your biggest cost is gone. You don't need to pay for battery storage and backup power because we're 24/7 in the sun, so your second biggest cost is gone. And then you need eight times less solar cells because one square meter of solar panel in space produces eight times the energy of one square meter of solar panel on Earth. So the only additional cost, or the main additional cost we have in space, is the launch cost.
And so you can clearly see there's a break-even point where the launch cost comes below the cost of permitted land, batteries, and solar, and we see that break-even cost to be around $500 a kilo, so about a 10x reduction from where we are today. But that's well within range of the launch vehicles that are coming online. So for comparison, Starship is designed to produce launch cost of around 10 to $20 a kilo.
And so I think I'll just finish by playing you one final concept video, and this shows a constellation that we're building now. So we've just filed with the SEC for a constellation of 88,000 satellites. Each one's about 200 kilowatts. It will enable us to deploy on the order of 20 gigawatts of new compute capacity, really just scratching the surface with this new constellation. And it will enable — it's basically for all inference workloads. And so this could be — and yeah, maybe I'll start the video and you can get a sense of it.
So in this case it's to generate a 3D video, but it could also be for back-office business processing agents, code generation agents. They will come up via optical link to this constellation in this dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Means it's always in the sun, 24/7 power, sub-50-millisecond latency to anywhere on Earth, all optically linked.
And this really is the start of the largest infrastructure project ever. I mean, we're talking about just for this constellation of 88,000, we're talking about a hundred billion dollars of capex spend, which is actually much lower than it would cost to do terrestrially. And not only is it the start of the largest infrastructure project, it's also, in my opinion, the start of a Kardashev Type II, Dyson sphere type civilization, and potentially Kardashev Type III. I will finish there, and we have about four minutes for questions. So any questions? Yeah, we'll start at the front.
Yes. Yeah. It's a great question. So because space is a vacuum, it's actually much harder — you know, space is only 3 degrees Kelvin, so very low ambient temperature. But because it's a vacuum, as you rightly point out, it's actually quite difficult to dissipate that heat, and what it requires is a large surface area so that you can emit that in infrared. So everything that's warm is glowing in infrared all the time. If you had an infrared camera on my face, you'd see that I'm glowing. And so the rough math on this surface area is: your solar panels generate around 200 watts per square meter, and the radiator, if you keep it around 50 degrees Celsius, will dissipate around 800 watts per square meter. So what that means is, if you've got a — you need about a quarter again the surface area in radiator than you have on solar panel. So if you had a 400 square meter solar panel, you'd need an additional 100 square meters of radiator to dissipate that heat.
There's a very nice equation called the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, which basically says that the rate of thermal dissipation is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. So if you can jack up that temperature, instead of being 50 degrees to 80 degrees, which is like a 10% increase in Kelvin, then you can actually halve the surface area of your radiator, or close to halve the surface area of the radiator. And so that's what we're working on with NVIDIA now. If anybody was at GTC, you'll have seen Jensen walk out to the deployment video of Starcloud-1, and then he spent five minutes talking about the new space Rubin-1 chip that we're working on, and it's designed to run at a hotter temperature without having a higher failure rate. And the reason you want it to run at a hotter temperature is so that you can lower the mass on the radiator.
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's also related to the question asked about the space in space. I think so — it's something we take incredibly seriously. You know, everybody needs to be a responsible user of space. We do, and everybody else. We're, you know, keen to make sure that space is usable forever. For the first few satellites, you can solve it in a few ways. If you fly at a relatively low altitude, the chance of a Kessler-type effect is extremely low. So our first satellite, we're flying around 400 km altitude. That means that it will naturally deorbit within a few months. And so if you were to have a collision at that altitude, by the time it gets around to the next orbit, you're already a few hundred meters below where you had the collision, and the chance of Kessler is very, very low.
Yeah, as you fly higher, it's actually extremely unpopulated, those high orbits, because then you start to edge into the Van Allen radiation belt. But I mean, we actually have a pretty good case study for this, and that is SpaceX is now operating around 10,000 satellites without ever having a single collision in low Earth orbit. And the way that you do that is by having pretty sophisticated collision avoidance.
The other reason I think people think this is more of an issue than it actually is, and the reason that space is so much larger than it looks, is when you see a map of all of those satellites, each dot on those maps is about the width of California, and you're representing something that might be this wide by something the width of California. And so people can often think that space is very congested. It's actually — we can easily fit on the order of terawatts of compute in just this dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit without having huge problems with collision avoidance.
Any other questions? Yeah.
