The largest orbital compute cluster is open for business

For all the hype about data centers in space, there just aren’t that many GPUs. Now that that’s starting to change, the short-term activity of orbital computation is starting to take shape.

The largest computing cluster currently in orbit was launched in January by Canada’s Kepler Communications and features approximately 40 Nvidia Orin edge processors on board 10 operational satellites, all connected by laser communications links.

The company now has 18 customers and on Monday announced its newest: Sophia Space, a startup that will test the software for its unique orbital computer aboard the Kepler constellation.

Experts expect that we will not see large-scale data centers such as those of SpaceX or Blue Origin until 2030. The first step will be to process data collected in orbit to improve the capabilities of space-based sensors used by private companies and government agencies.

Kepler does not see itself as a data center company, but as infrastructure for applications in space, CEO Mina Mitry tells TechCrunch. It wants to be a layer that provides network services for other satellites in space, or drones and planes in the sky below.

Sophia, on the other hand, is developing passively cooled space computers that can solve one of the key challenges facing large-scale data centers in orbit: preventing powerful processors from overheating without having to build and launch heavy, expensive active cooling systems.

In the new partnership, Sophia will upload her own operating system to one of Kepler’s satellites and attempt to launch and configure it via six GPUs on two spacecraft. Those types of activities are table stakes in an Earth data center, and this is the first time it has been attempted in orbit. Ensuring the software works in orbit will be a key risk mitigation exercise for Sophia in the lead-up to the first planned satellite launch in late 2027.

For Kepler, the partnership helps prove the usefulness of its network. It currently carries and processes data uploaded from the ground or collected by hosted payloads on its own spacecraft. But as the industry matures, the company expects to connect to third-party satellites to provide networking and processing services.

Mitry says satellite companies are now planning future assets around this model, pointing to the benefits of offloading processing for more power-hungry sensors such as synthetic aperture radar. The US military is a key customer for that kind of work as it develops a new missile defense system based on satellites that detect and track threats. Kepler has already demonstrated a space-to-air laser link in a demo for the US government.

That kind of edge processing – handling data where it is collected for faster response speed – is where orbital data centers will prove their value initially. That vision sets Sophia and Kepler apart from established space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, or startups like Starcloud and Aetherflux that are raising significant capital to focus on large-scale data centers with data center-like processors.

“Because we believe it’s more about inference than training, we want more distributed GPUs that can do inference, rather than one super-powerful GPU that can deliver the training load,” Mitry told TechCrunch. “If this thing is using kilowatts of power and you’re only running 10% of the time, that’s not very useful. In our case, our GPUs are running 100% of the time.”

And once these technologies are proven in orbit, anything can happen. Sophia CEO Rob DeMillo points out that Wisconsin last week passed a ban on data center construction, something some lawmakers in Congress are also pushing for. In their view, anything that limits data centers on Earth makes the space-based alternative more attractive.

“There are no more data centers in this country,” Demillo mused. “It gets weird from here.”