Orbital Data Center Startup to Mine Bitcoin in Space
Nvidia-backed Starcloud plans to become the first company to mine Bitcoin from space later this year with its second spacecraft launch.Summary
Starcloud, an orbital data center startup backed by Nvidia, announced plans to begin mining Bitcoin from space later this year upon the launch of its second spacecraft, aiming to be the first entity to do so off Earth. CEO Philip Johnston highlighted that using ASIC miners for Bitcoin applications in space is significantly more economical than using GPUs on Earth, citing ASICs as being about 30 times cheaper per watt. Johnston believes space-based Bitcoin mining will become a "massive industry" because current terrestrial mining consumes about 20 GW continuously, which he argues makes no economic sense long-term. Founded in 2024 to address AI energy needs with space data centers, Starcloud previously launched a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit. The company's future data centers are planned to comprise around 88,000 satellites primarily powered by solar energy. The article also briefly mentions unrelated work by other entrepreneurs on theoretically sending Bitcoin transactions to Mars using optical links, though they deemed mining on Mars infeasible due to latency.
(Source：Cointelegraph)