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 using the complete works of Shakespeare.

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The company’s Starcloud-1 satellite is also now running and querying responses from Gemma, an open large language model from Google based on the company’s Gemini models, in orbit, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been run on a high-powered Nvidia GPU in outer space, CNBC has learned.

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Starcloud — a member of the Nvidia Inception program and graduate from Y Combinator and the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator — plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with solar and cooling panels that measure roughly 4 kilometers in both width and height. A compute cluster of that gigawatt size would produce more power than the largest power plant in the U.S. and would be substantially smaller and cheaper than a terrestrial solar farm of the same capacity, according to Starcloud’s white paper.

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Along with Starcloud and Nvidia’s efforts, several companies have announced space-based data center missions. On Nov. 4, Google unveiled a “moonshot” initiative titled Project Suncatcher, which aims to put solar-powered satellites into space with Google’s tensor processing units. Privately owned Lonestar Data Holdings is working to put the first-ever commercial lunar data center on the moon’s surface. Aetherflux, founded by former Robinhood co-founder and chief executive Baiju Bhatt, on Tuesday announced a target to deploy an orbital data center satellite in the first quarter of 2027.