Nvidia-backed Starcloud Trains First AI Model in Space Using Satellite with H100 GPU

Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud trained an artificial intelligence model from space for the first time, signaling a new era for orbital data centers that could alleviate Earth's escalating digital infrastructure crisis.

Last month, the Washington-based company launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit, sending a chip into outer space that's 100 times more powerful than any GPU compute that has been in space before.

Starcloud was able to train and run NanoGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, on the H100 chip in orbit.

The company's Starcloud-1 satellite is running Gemma, an open model from Google, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been trained in outer space.