Good morning. My name is Philip and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, and we're building data centers in space.
So two weeks ago, I was at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to watch the launch of our first spacecraft. What was particularly interesting about our spacecraft is it was the first time anybody has tried to launch AI data center grade chips to space. In particular, we were the first to launch the NVIDIA H100 chip, which is about a hundred times more powerful GPU or AI compute than has ever been launched to space before.
This satellite actually marks the first in a much larger vision to build almost all data centers in space. And today I will briefly make the case for this idea: the idea that the abundant energy and cold temperatures in space mean that it will soon make much more sense to build almost all data centers in space than it does to build them on Earth.
But first, if you've ever seen a data center, you'll know that they are absolutely massive. And so I know it can be difficult to imagine what a huge, sort of multi-gigawatt data center in space might look like. So I'd like to start by showing you a short concept video — a 15-second concept video of what a 5-gigawatt, 100,000-ton data center in space might look like.
So this is a Starship-size spacecraft with a 40-megawatt, 100-ton payload deploying to a 5-gigawatt data center with a 4 km by 4 km solar panel and a 1 km by 4 km radiator down the back there.
How will this be possible? It will be possible because of the new launch vehicles that are coming online. In particular, the Starship launch vehicle from SpaceX, which will on the one hand lower the cost of launch by at least 10 to 100x, but more interestingly increase the capacity of launch by a thousand times or more. And the reason that this is possible is because it's the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
So with the current launch vehicle, Falcon 9, if you build a new one every day for a year, at the end of the year you still only have one Falcon 9 upper stage because it's expendable. Whereas with Starship, if you build a new one every day for a year — which is a very conservative estimate on what they're trying to do — at the end of the year you have 365 Starships because it's reusable, and you can fly at least five times the payload capacity of the Falcon 9. So what's coming down the line in terms of launch capacity is absolutely mind-blowing and will be a huge game changer.
But we're not starting there. We're starting much smaller than that.
So this is the spacecraft that we launched two weeks ago. It's a 60 kg smallsat. It's about the size of a fridge. As I mentioned, it has the first NVIDIA H100 on board. We're doing two weeks of commissioning and then we'll be the first to train a model in space, the first to run high-powered inference — in particular, inference on imagery from the Department of Defense and other types of satellites. We're going to be the first to run a version of Google Cloud in collaboration with Google — a version of Gemini, sorry, called Gemma. So many new firsts coming with this, but it's the first of many.
So next year in October, we're launching a much larger spacecraft. It has 100 times the power generation, by far the largest commercial radiator in space. This will be the first commercial offering. It offers inference and cloud services to other satellites. And then from there, we scale up into the 2030s where we'll launch the full Starship payload bay size.
I'm just going to show you a short video of the deployment of this spacecraft two weeks ago because we got the most incredible shot of the deployment with a silhouette behind. So I'm going to show that to you now.
So this is our spacecraft on the end of a...
