Starcloud plans to achieve space Bitcoin mining by the end of the year, will carry ASIC on its second satellite.

September 23 — Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud plans to establish a space Bitcoin mining operation by the end of this year. CEO Philip Johnston said in an interview, "We will be the first company to mine Bitcoin in space, and we will carry some Bitcoin mining ASICs on the second spacecraft launching later this year."

Starcloud was founded in 2024 with the core goal of sending its data centers into space, leveraging continuous solar power and radiative cooling to scale to gigawatt-level computing power while circumventing ground-based permitting restrictions. Starcloud-2 is the second of the company's four planned satellites, positioned as its first commercial mission and will carry GPU clusters, but the official project page does not mention Bitcoin mining or ASICs.

Johnston explained the economic rationale for pivoting to Bitcoin mining: ASICs cost about 30 times less per kilowatt than GPUs. A 1-kilowatt Nvidia B200 chip costs about $30,000, while a 1-kilowatt ASIC costs only about $1,000.