As space enterprises aim to deploy the most advanced chips into orbit, cooling these high-powered processors is a key issue. “It’s cold in space… [but] there’s no airflow, so the only way to dissipate is through conduction,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang commented in regard to space-based data centers during his firm’s latest earnings call.
Sophia Space has secured $10 million from investors like Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The company intends to validate a new approach to passively cooling space computers on Earth, then purchase a satellite bus from Apex Space and demonstrate its effectiveness in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.
While companies such as SpaceX, Google, and Starcloud explore traditional satellite forms for their proposed space data center constellations, which depend on large radiators, Sophia Space’s founders — CTO Leon Alkalai, CEO Rob DeMillo, and chief growth officer Brian Monnin — follow a different strategy.
The tech originates from a unique source: a $100-million-endowed program at Caltech focused on developing orbital solar plants to transmit electricity to Earth. Researchers ultimately chose a sail-like structure, thin and flexible compared to conventional satellites.
Although overcoming technical and regulatory hurdles for producing electricity for Earth is challenging, Alkalai — a fellow at Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory — was inspired to apply the design for powering space-based processors. (Aetherflux, a space solar power startup, had a similar realization.)
As an Nvidia partner, Sophia has created modular server racks with integrated solar panels, called TILES, measuring 1 meter by 1 meter and a few centimeters thick. DeMillo explains that this slim form allows processors to rest against a passive heat spreader, removing the need for active cooling. He anticipates that 92% of the generated power will be dedicated to processing, a considerable improvement over traditional designs, though it requires a sophisticated software management system to balance processor activity.
By the 2030s, Sophia aims to construct larger space data centers from thousands of TILEs, envisioning a 50-meter-by-50-meter structure delivering 1 MW of computing power. DeMillo argues that building space data centers with less efficient systems won’t be cost-effective, and that a single, large structure will be easier to execute than a distributed network connected by lasers.
Initially, Sophia plans to offer its TILEs to satellite operators requiring on-orbit computing solutions. Potential partners include Earth-observation satellites handling vast amounts of sensor data, as well as missile warning and tracking systems under Pentagon investment, or increasingly complex communications networks.
“The dirty little secret of the satellite industry is we’ve got all these amazing sensors up there that produce terabytes, or even petabytes, of data every few minutes, and they discard most of it because they can’t compute on board and can’t achieve the round trip to the surface fast enough,” DeMillo stated to TechCrunch.