Reading StarCloud’s Whitepaper So You Don’t Have To

This video is brought to you with IEEE Spectrum, an award-winning engineering magazine. Read  their excellent article on the same subject, and subscribe to the magazine with a 20%  discount with the links in the description Lately it feels like the entire world has  lost its mind chasing the next revolution

in computer science. Surging demand for  Ai has impacted our lives in many ways. In just a matter of years Ai has grown to  demand nearly 2% of total energy generation, with that number expected to double by 2030.

Trade agreements have been torn apart  and hastily rewritten as countries attempt to create a technological  moat around the chips powering this revolution. Driving inflation and  energy costs for normal citizens.

And nuclear energy stocks have exploded in growth  as energy becomes a limiting factor for growth. Leading to massive data centers  illegally powered by portable natural gas generators that destroy air  quality in their immediate vicinity.

But the craziest ideas have come  from the billionaires. They say that reusable rockets will  cut down launch costs so much that gigantic solar powered data centers  can be placed in Earth Orbit. Free, unyielding solar energy with no land owners  to negotiate with, no environmental policies

standing in your way, and as we all know,  in space no-one can hear you protest. In March 2026, Starcloud received 170 million  dollars in funding on the back of this idea.

Billionaires will attempt to pull the rug over your eyes and convince you that  this technology makes total sense, but reality is, this technology is dumb. And  I’m going to explain to you exactly why.

Let’s start with the core of a data center. It is  filled with server racks like these: the Nvidia NVL-72 sporting seventy-two GB200 GPUs paired  with 36 CPUs cores and 17 terabytes of RAM. It provides up to 720,000 teraflops (FP8) of compute  at the cost of about 120 kilowatts of electricity.

A large house with air conditioning  blasting may consume 2 kilowatts. This one rack consumes the  power of 60 suburban homes.

Only server racks like these can handle the vast amounts of data and number crunching  needed to run large language models.

For comparison, this is the  Versal System-on-Chip from AMD, found in the latest Starlink satellites. It is  a thousand times less powerful while consuming a hundred times less power. That’s the ‘edge  compute’ in existing satellites and we can’t

just stack space grade hardware. This starlink  satellite has a peak power generation of 5 kilowatts. No where close to the demands of a  single Nvidia NLV72 server. Radically different space hardware has been imagined in Starcloud’s  white paper to quote unquote “solve” this problem.