Building the First Data Centers in Space
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First thing every space company should do is book the first available launch they can. Before they've built the thing that they're going to launch. Before they've built the thing, before they probably even know what they're going to launch. Booking a launch is such a good forcing function for a space company. So we founded the company January 1st, 2024. January 2nd, we booked the first available SpaceX rideshare launch. And we were like, okay, something is going to be on that rocket. I'm not 100% sure what it's going to be at this point, but something is going to be on there.
Sounds like the same advice for all the software companies. Just got to keep launching and launching. Same thing.
Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we're sitting down with Philip Johnston, the co-founder and CEO of StarCloud. StarCloud is building data centers in space to address the energy bottleneck that AI is creating here on Earth. Earlier this year, they raised $170 million led by Benchmark and became the fastest growing unicorn in YC history, just 17 months after Demo Day. Philip, welcome to The Light Cone.
Thanks so much for having me. So to start off, why data centers in space? So we are very quickly running up on constraints on where we can build new energy projects terrestrially. And so by building them in space, we get access to this almost unlimited low-cost energy in the form of solar. Of course, there's other costs, like the cost of launch. And the cost of launch is actually very rapidly trending down, with new launch vehicles coming online, the Falcon 9 program, and Starship on the horizon. And so that's the reason we're building data centers in space.
How did you come up with the idea? It's not sort of like the typical idea that people come up with.
I'd actually been working. I was with McKinsey for a few years working with the space agencies of different governments. And I could see that the launch cost was very rapidly trending down. And actually in early 2023, I decided randomly on a weekend to take a trip down to Starbase, Texas, where they're building the Starship launch program. even before the first launch, and not many people were paying attention back then. And I could see that they were just building enormous capacity. So they're building these two Starship gigafactories. They're designed to produce something like three Starships per day. And because Starship is reusable, you know, on a sort of three or four year timeframe, that could lead to us having thousands of times the capacity to get things to space.
And so I started thinking, okay, let's just run the clock forward. If the launch cost was 10 times lower than it is today, and the launch capacity was maybe a thousand times more than we have today, what would make sense that that currently doesn't make sense and so started thinking about some of the concepts from sci-fi that i remember as a kid you know like space-based solar where you have these huge solar panels in space you beam that power down um and essentially i just reached out to to a few folks and you know i knew in space industry and got connected with a few others and started you know ideating on okay what would make sense if the launch cost was much lower than it is today
I'm curious, are there any other ideas that occurred to you during this process when you were thinking of what people could build in space?
Why did Starcloud decide to build data centers in space?
Yeah, tons. I mean, we definitely looked at manufacturing in space and there's Varda. We looked at asteroid mining and obviously YC has Astroforge. We looked at space hotels. We looked at But basically anything which could make sense if the launch cost was a lot lower than it is today.
And how come data centers was the best choice?
Data centers makes a lot of sense to be the first thing you do because you don't need to re-enter a product. So with things like asteroid mining or with... manufacturing in space or space hotels, they require this very expensive reentry process. Initially, what we actually started doing was space-based solar.
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