At 13:09 on November 2, Beijing time, SpaceX used the Falcon 9 rocket numbered B1091 to carry out a new single launch mission (Bandwagon-4), the 18th time in history.There are 18 satellites carried this time, the largest is a reconnaissance satellite of the South Korean Ministry of National Defense’s “Project 425”, like the previous three, are equipped with SAR synthetic aperture radar. In addition, SpaceX has also launched an electromagnetic and infrared reconnaissance satellite for it.
Among other loads,The most interesting one is Starcloud-1, which is claimed to be humanity’s first attempt to launch an AI data center into space.
This is a family owned byNVIDIA investment and establishment, a defense and aerospace manufacturing startup company supported by many institutions.
The satellite weighs only about 60 kilograms and is about the size of a refrigerator. It is equipped with an NVIDIA H100 GPU accelerator and can run AI models in space, including a special version of the Google Gemini model.
Crusoe plans to deploy cloud services on the Starcloud satellite by the end of 2026 and provide GPU computing power from space in early 2027.
NVIDIA is also quite proud of this, saying it isFor the first time, the most advanced data center-grade GPU has been sent into outer space.
In addition to deploying a large-scale solar panel array, this satellite also innovatively uses vacuum as an "infinite radiator" to solve the heat dissipation problem of traditional data centers on Earth.
Currently, the biggest problem of AI data centers is the huge consumption of water and electricity.
Starcloud's space-based data center is driven by solar energy in space, providing almost infinite and efficient supply. It is said that the cost is only about one-tenth of the land-based solution.
Starcloud even predicts that within 10 years, almost all new data centers will be located in outer space.
