Starcloud, a startup building data centers in orbit, announced on Friday it had raised $250 million in an expanded Series A round, lifting its valuation to $2.3 billion. The round was backed by NVIDIA and Cisco Investments, among others.
The additional capital will allow the company to open a larger manufacturing facility and advance its largest orbital data center spacecraft, which is designed to run AI compute in space. The company had previously raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation in March 2026.
Starcloud is part of a growing wave of space-based computing startups that argue orbiting data centers could solve AI's terrestrial energy crisis by leveraging solar power in space and the natural cooling of the vacuum. The company has already successfully operated NVIDIA H100 GPUs in orbit.
The funding comes as demand for AI compute continues to outstrip available data center capacity on Earth, with major cloud providers struggling to build facilities fast enough to meet the needs of AI model training and inference.
