Orbital data center company to start mining Bitcoin in space

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston noted that it is 30 times cheaper to mine Bitcoin on ASICs than on GPUs in space on a kilowatt-hour basis.

Starcloud, an Nvidia-backed orbital data center startup, said it will start mining Bitcoin from space later this year when its second spacecraft is launched, positioning it to become the first company to mine Bitcoin off Earth.

Starcloud “will be the first to mine Bitcoin in space,” the startup’s CEO, Philip Johnston, posted to X on Saturday after revealing its Bitcoin mining ambitions in space in an interview with HyperChange on Thursday.

In the interview, Johnston said running Bitcoin application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners would be “one of the most compelling use cases” of space compute due to it being significantly cheaper than GPUs.

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