Neocloud Crusoe is going to space.

The company plans to deploy on a Starcloud satellite scheduled to launch in late 2026, and offer limited GPU capacity from space by early 2027.

The partnership comes ahead of the expected launch of the Starcloud-1 satellite this November. About the size of a small refrigerator, the 60kg satellite will feature an Nvidia H100 GPU and trial the concept of space-based compute.

Based on Astro Digital’s Corvus-Micro bus, the expected mission lifetime is 11 months, after which the satellite will de-orbit from its 325km orbit and burn up.

Should the test go as planned, the company hopes to build significantly larger data centers in space, and has pitched deploying a 5GW data center satellite powered by a four sq km solar array.

The scale of the Crusoe deployment with Starcloud has yet to be revealed.

"Having Crusoe as the foundational cloud provider on our platform is a perfect alignment of vision and execution," said Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud.

"Crusoe's expertise in building rugged, efficient, and scalable computing solutions makes them the ideal partner to pioneer this new era. Together, we are building not just a data center in space, but a new category of cloud computing that will unlock extraordinary possibilities for research, discovery, and innovation." 

Cully Cavness, co-founder, president, and COO of Crusoe, added: "At Crusoe, we believe that space will ultimately matter to the future of computing because it enables new solutions to a key scaling constraint for AI infrastructure, which is sourcing abundant, consistent, and clean energy."

Reports also emerged today that Crusoe secured $1.4 billion in a funding round led by Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners that saw the company valued at $10bn.

A number of companies plan to deploy data centers in space, including Axiom Space, NTT, Ramon.Space, and Sophia Space.

Earlier this year, startup Lonestar successfully put a small data center on the Moon, carrying an article from DCD (read it here).

Earlier this month, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos mused about gigawatt data centers in space in a decade, while Google billionaire Eric Schmidt said that it was why he bought rocket company Relativity Space.