Starcloud raises $250M at a $2.3B valuation for orbital data centers

Starcloud has raised a $250 million extension to its Series A at a $2.3 billion valuation, the company said on August 21. Investment firm Manhattan West led the round, with Nvidia and Cisco among the new backers. The Redmond, Washington startup builds satellites that run AI workloads in orbit, and it’s stockpiling cash partly because rocket rides are getting hard to book.

The extension more than doubles the $1.1 billion valuation Starcloud set in March, when it closed a $170 million Series A. Total funding now stands at $450 million since the company’s 2024 founding, per Via Satellite. Nvidia’s share of the new money was $25 million, a person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital and Standard Capital also participated.

Starcloud’s pitch is that orbit relieves the constraints squeezing AI infrastructure on the ground, where the shortage has moved from chips to power. A satellite can face the sun at all times, which means solar power around the clock, without the storms and nighttime dips that cut output on Earth, the company argues in SiliconANGLE’s coverage. Starcloud has asked the FCC for permission to operate 88,000 spacecraft, a constellation it says would add up to 20 gigawatts of compute.

That’s not just a paper ambition. Starcloud-1, a 60 kilogram satellite SpaceX launched in November 2025, was the first to operate an Nvidia H100 data center GPU in low Earth orbit, per SpaceNews. The company used it to train a model and run a version of Google’s Gemini.

Those results helped convince Nvidia to invest, CEO Philip Johnston told TechCrunch. They’re also feeding into the chipmaker’s first purpose-built space GPU, the Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, which Nvidia says would deliver up to 25 times more AI compute than the H100.

Last November we put the first Nvidia H100 in orbit. Today this fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs into space.

Philip Johnston, CEO and co-founder of Starcloud, via Via Satellite

The new capital goes toward manufacturing and launch. Starcloud, currently 25 people, is building production lines at a 100,000 square foot facility in Woodinville, Washington, sized to mass produce its 200 kilowatt Starcloud-3 spacecraft.

Spacecraft	Size and power	Status
Starcloud-1	60 kg, one Nvidia H100	Launched November 2025, ran the first orbital AI training run
Starcloud-2	450 kg, about 8 kW	Slated for a January Falcon 9 rideshare
Starcloud-3	3 tons, 200 kW	In development, sized for SpaceX’s Starship

The catch is getting to orbit at all. Johnston told TechCrunch that securing launch capacity is now one of the company’s biggest costs, because the Falcon 9 program is scheduled to end in 2028. SpaceNews reports rideshare slots on the rocket are already unavailable beyond late 2028 or early 2029.

Starship, the bigger rocket Starcloud-3 depends on, hasn’t been re-flown yet. Elon Musk said this week that SpaceX pushed its next attempt to catch a returning Starship back a few months, but still aims to re-fly the vehicle at the end of this year or in early 2027.

Obviously if we can’t book any SpaceX launch capacity in 2029, that will be challenging for us.

Philip Johnston, via TechCrunch

There’s a wrinkle in that dependency, because SpaceX is now a rival as well as a ride. The rocket maker is designing its own Starmind AI satellites with Nvidia, part of a plan for up to one million orbital data center satellites. A regulatory filing this month showed Nvidia held about $21 billion of SpaceX stock as of June 30.

Nvidia’s balance sheet now runs through much of the AI buildout, from chip guarantees that unlocked $500 billion in financing to this round. Others are routing around the launch squeeze entirely: rival Cowboy Space raised $275 million this year to build its own rockets.

Still, the near-term tests are concrete. The first Starcloud-2, a 450 kilogram satellite with about 8 kilowatts of onboard power, is slated for a January Falcon 9 rideshare, carrying inference work for customers that include US government agencies. After that, the question is whether Starship flies again on Musk’s timeline, because the larger constellation is built around that rocket driving down launch costs. The Space-1 chip hasn’t even been built yet, but Starcloud hopes to fly it in late 2028.