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Summary

Starcloud, backed by Nvidia, said it plans to start bitcoin mining in space after launching a satellite later this year.
Starcloud argued that ASICs are far more cost-competitive than GPUs on a power basis, and that because the bitcoin mining industry consumes about 20 gigawatts of electricity, space-based mining could be more economical over the long term.
Bitcoin has fallen about 48% from its peak, but mining difficulty has declined by about 7%, partially easing the burden on mining firms.

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Starcloud, a space data center startup backed by Nvidia, said it plans to begin mining bitcoin in space after launching a satellite later this year.

According to Cointelegraph on the 9th (local time), Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said, “We plan to start mining bitcoin from the second spacecraft to be launched this year, and we will be the first company to mine bitcoin in space.”

In an interview, Johnston explained that deploying application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) designed for bitcoin mining in a space computing environment could be a highly promising use case. “Graphics processing units (GPUs) are about 30 times more expensive per watt than ASICs,” he said. “If a 1-kilowatt-class GPU chip costs about $30,000, an ASIC with the same power draw is about $1,000.”

He also argued that “since bitcoin mining is an industry that continuously consumes about 20 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, in the long run it could be more economical to mine in space than on the ground.”

Starcloud was founded in early 2024 with the goal of building space-based data centers to address rising power demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. In November last year, it placed a satellite equipped with Nvidia’s H100 GPU into orbit, marking the first instance of a high-performance GPU operating in space.

The company envisions building a space data center network comprising about 88,000 satellites, with solar power expected to be the primary energy source.

Separately, tech entrepreneurs Jose E. Puente and Carlos Puente last year proposed the concept of transmitting bitcoin over an interplanetary network. They said that, in theory, using optical communication links and a satellite relay network could deliver bitcoin transactions from Earth to Mars in about 3 minutes. However, they assessed that directly mining bitcoin on Mars would be impractical due to interplanetary communication latency.

Bitcoin mining profitability has recently deteriorated amid falling prices. Bitcoin is down about 48% from the peak of about $126,080 recorded in October last year. Still, mining difficulty has eased by about 7%, falling from 155.9 trillion recorded in November last year to roughly 145 trillion recently, partially reducing the burden on miners.