As space companies eager to send cutting-edge chips into orbit, the issue of cooling those high-performance processors has become a top priority.
“Space is cold…” [but] There’s no airflow, so the only way to dissipate is conduction,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said when asked about space-based data centers during the company’s recent earnings call.
To date, Sophia Space has raised $10 million from investors including Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The company plans to demonstrate a new approach to passively cooling space computers on the ground, then purchase a satellite bus from Apex Space and demonstrate operation in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.
Companies like SpaceX, Google, and Starcloud are considering traditional satellite form factors for proposed space data center fleets that rely on large radiators to keep chips in optimal thermal conditions. But Sophia Space founders CTO Leon Alcalai, CEO Rob DeMillo and chief growth officer Brian Monin are taking a different approach.
The company’s technology comes from an unusual source. It’s a $100 million endowed program at the California Institute of Technology to develop an orbiting solar power plant that will power the Earth below. The researchers ultimately settled on a sail-like structure that is thinner and more flexible than traditional, boxy satellites.
While technical and regulatory challenges make it difficult to generate electricity on Earth, Alkalay, a fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed by the California Institute of Technology, was struck by the idea of using the design to power space-based processors. (Aetherflux, a space solar power startup, feels the same way.)
Nvidia partner Sophia has designed a modular server rack called TILES that integrates solar panels with an area of 1 meter by 1 meter and a depth of several centimeters. De Milo says this thin form factor allows the processor to be closer to a passive heat spreader, eliminating the need for active cooling. He expects 92% of the power generated to be used for processing, a significant improvement over traditional designs. However, this design requires a sophisticated software management system to balance activity between processors.
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By the 2030s, Sofia wants to build a larger space data center from thousands of TILEs, envisioning a 50 meter by 50 meter structure that would provide 1 MW of computing power. De Milo argues that trying to build a space data center with less efficient systems is uneconomical, and that a single structure is easier to implement than a distributed network linked by lasers.
However, Sophia plans to start by offering TILE to satellite operators who need in-orbit computing solutions. Potential partners include Earth observation satellites that collect vast amounts of sensor data, missile warning and tracking systems that the Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to build, and increasingly complex communications networks.
“The dirty little secret in the satellite industry is that they have all these amazing sensors that generate terabytes or even petabytes of data every few minutes, but they can’t do the computing on board and can’t travel to and from the surface fast enough, so most of it gets scrapped,” De Milo told TechCrunch.
