A Washington-based company wants to build a massive network of satellites that would work as data centers in space. Starcloud has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch as many as 88,000 satellites to handle artificial intelligence processing in orbit.
The company, based in Redmond, Washington, submitted its application to the FCC on March 13. Starcloud, previously known as Lumen Orbit, aims to place these satellites in low Earth orbit between 600 and 850 kilometers high. The satellites would operate as orbital data centers running AI and other computing tasks.
Ground-based data centers face growing limits as AI demand explodes. Power supply, cooling needs, and physical space create roadblocks for companies trying to scale AI operations on Earth. Starcloud says moving data centers to space avoids these limits and offers a cheaper way to expand computing power.
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The satellites will fly in sun-synchronous orbits timed so they always face the sun. This design gives them near-continuous solar power for their processors. The company plans to place them in narrow orbital bands up to 50 kilometers thick to keep them organized and safe.
Starcloud satellites would connect to existing internet constellations like Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and Blue Origin’s Tera Wave using laser links. They would receive data, process it in orbit using AI chips, and send results back down. The company says it takes space safety seriously and will follow best practices to avoid collisions. The satellites are built to burn up completely when they fall back to Earth, leaving no debris.
Starcloud has launched only one small test satellite so far. The 60-kilogram Starcloud-1 went up in November on a SpaceX rocket and became the first to run an Nvidia H100 processor in orbit. It successfully ran a version of Google’s Gemini AI model. The company has not shared many details about the design of its planned 88,000 satellites, including their size and weight. The constellation would also depend on other companies’ networks for most communication.
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If approved, this would be one of the largest satellite constellations ever proposed. SpaceX currently operates about 10,000 Starlink satellites, and even SpaceX’s own orbital data center plan tops out at one million satellites. Starcloud aims to launch its first commercial spacecraft, Starcloud-2, in 2027 with a cluster of processors. The company’s long-term vision includes massive satellites deployed by SpaceX Starship vehicles with solar arrays spanning kilometers to power multi-gigawatt data centers. This could reshape how and where the world runs its most demanding AI computing.
