Orbital data center (ODC) company Starcloud has announced a $250 million Series A extension funding round to its March $170m Series A, at a $2.3 billion post-money valuation led by Manhattan West.

Manhattan West was joined in the Series A by existing investors Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, and others, as well as new investors Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, Standard Capital, and others.

The company aspires to operate a constellation of 88,000 orbital computing satellites delivering 20GW of capacity, which it has already asked the FCC permission for. The new funding takes Starcloud’s total raise since its 2024 foundation to $450 million.

"Last November we put the first NVIDIA H100 in orbit,” said Starcloud co-founder and CEO, Philip Johnston, in a statement. “Today, this fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs into space.”

Redmond, Washington-based Starcloud, which today employs 25 people, is currently developing the production lines for its Starcloud-3 spacecraft at a new 100,000-square-foot factory in Woodinville, Washington.

Starcloud boasts a number of firsts in the ODC race such as AI inference, and the training and operation of NanoGPT, a minimalist, Python-based LLM created by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy for educational purposes. This training involved reading the complete works of Shakespeare, and being asked to speak "Shakespearean English”. Starcloud then moved onto running Google’s Gemma, another lightweight model.

Like many ODC developers, Starcloud was eager to emphasize its relationship with Nvidia, announced in March 2026 when the companies agreed to deploy the Space-1 Vera Rubin module in late 2028, predated by Starcloud’s use of Nvidia’s H100 GPU, which orbited with the Starcloud-1 demonstrator in November 2025.

Despite possessing an unexclusive relationship with the Vera Rubin module and Nvidia, Starcloud name-dropped the world’s largest company by market cap eight times in its press release.

Nvidia also intends to put the space-hardened Vera Rubin module into orbit with Cowboy Space (formerly Aetherflux), Axiom Space, Kepler Communications, Planet, and Sophia Space, to name a few. As yet, the chip has yet to be built.

Cowboy Space saw a similar raise in May for its Series B, closing a $275m round at a $2bn valuation, pledging to vertically integrate ODCs with space rockets.

“Cisco has long been a leader in secure data center infrastructure and looks forward to bringing that expertise to the emerging world of orbital data centers,” said Aleem Rizvon, vice president, Cisco Investments, in the same statement. “Cisco Investments is excited to invest in Starcloud as [it] expands data centers into space.”