By late 2025, the "Compute Bottleneck" on Earth has reached a crisis point. Between mounting energy grid strains and the astronomical water requirements for cooling massive terrestrial clusters, the AI revolution is hitting a physical wall. Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit) has officially breached that wall. On November 2, 2025, they made history by launching Starcloud-1, a refrigerator-sized satellite carrying the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit.
The Engineering Breakthrough: AI at 17,500 MPH
Founders Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, and Adi Oltean achieved in 15 months what traditional aerospace firms estimated would take a decade. The mission didn't just put a chip in space; it proved that "High-Performance Compute" can survive the harsh radiation and extreme thermal swings of the vacuum.
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Unlimited Power: By operating in a Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO), Starcloud-1 taps into near-continuous solar energy, bypassing the day/night cycles and atmospheric losses that plague Earth-based solar farms.
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Passive Radiative Cooling: Instead of consuming millions of gallons of fresh water, Starcloud utilizes the -270°C "infinite heat sink" of deep space to radiate thermal energy away from the H100.
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Edge Intelligence: The satellite has already successfully trained NanoGPT and run inference on Google's Gemma model in orbit, demonstrating that AI can process data where it is collected—eliminating the massive bandwidth bottleneck of downlinking raw satellite imagery.
The Roadmap to 10 Gigawatts
Starcloud is not just building a satellite; they are building a Sovereign Utility. Their white paper outlines a future of "Orbital Data Center Trains" connected by laser links, projected to offer energy costs 10x lower than terrestrial facilities. With Starcloud-2 (featuring NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture) scheduled for late 2026, the race to move the "Brain of Humanity" off-planet has officially begun.
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