ASICs in Orbit Offer 30x Cost Advantage Over GPUs
Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud will begin mining Bitcoin from orbit later this year, according to its CEO, Philip Johnston. The operation will commence with the company's second spacecraft launch, positioning Starcloud as the first entity to mine cryptocurrency beyond Earth's atmosphere. Johnston stated the move is driven by a significant economic advantage, highlighting the efficiency of specialized hardware in a space environment.
Johnston explained that application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners are a highly compelling use case for the company's orbital data centers. He detailed a stark cost difference, noting that a 1-kilowatt ASIC costs approximately $1,000, whereas a 1-kilowatt Nvidia B200 GPU chip costs around $30,000. This makes ASICs about 30 times less expensive per watt, providing a powerful financial incentive for moving these specific computational loads into orbit.
Starcloud's Bitcoin mining ambition is part of a broader strategy to address the massive energy requirements of modern computing. Founded in early 2024 to support artificial intelligence workloads, the company successfully launched its first satellite with an NVIDIA H100 GPU in November. This established the technical precedent for operating high-performance computing hardware in space.
The long-term vision is to shift Bitcoin's entire global energy consumption, estimated at 20 gigawatts, from terrestrial power grids to space-based solar power. Johnston argues that performing this energy-intensive work on Earth is inefficient. Starcloud plans to build out a constellation of approximately 88,000 satellites to create a network of solar-powered data centers, fundamentally reshaping the infrastructure of digital asset mining.
