Starcloud says its next satellite will double as a Bitcoin mine.
The Nvidia-backed space-data-center startup plans to fire up Bitcoin mining ASICs once its second spacecraft, Starcloud-2, reaches orbit later this year. CEO Philip Johnston told the Documenting Bitcoin podcast, "We'll be the first to mine Bitcoin in space," confirming the satellite will carry mining chips alongside its usual GPU cluster. The move is notable because Starcloud's own project page for Starcloud-2 makes no mention of crypto mining - the company has pitched itself on training AI models in orbit, not printing coins. Johnston's rationale is financial: he says ASICs run about 30 times cheaper per kilowatt than GPUs, citing a 1kW Nvidia B200 chip at $30,000 against a 1kW ASIC at roughly $1,000.
Starcloud was founded in 2024 on the promise that space offers continuous solar power, radiative cooling, and none of the permitting headaches that slow data centers on Earth. If cheap, abundant solar power is the real asset, pointing it at ASICs makes just as much sense as pointing it at GPUs - and Bitcoin mining is a far simpler way to prove that out than orbital AI training. That is a quieter admission than the pitch deck lets on: the "AI data centers in space" story doubles as a "whatever earns money with this power" story.
Satellites are hard to service and convection cooling does not work in a vacuum, so treat this as a pilot for the economics, not a verdict on space compute generally.