“Data center in space” firm Starcloud has secured investment from In-Q-Tel (IQT), a venture firm funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

“I am excited to share that Starcloud has received a strategic investment from In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit strategic investor that identifies, evaluates, and leverages emerging commercial technologies for the U.S. national security community and its allies,” Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Jonhston said on LinkedIn this week. “This strategic partnership between Starcloud and IQT will help accelerate Starcloud’s development of orbital data centers, providing customer satellites with high-performance on-orbit AI compute capabilities.”

While Starcloud is now listed on IQT’s investments page, the size of the investment wasn’t shared. The investment firm is yet to comment.

Founded last year and previously known as Lumen Orbit, the company hopes to deploy hundreds of very low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to act as a distributed data center for other satellites, reducing the need for sending data to the ground.

The company said that space-based data centers would be able to utilize high-intensity 24/7 solar power, without worrying about day/night cycles or atmospheric losses.

Lumen has lofty ambitions, with renders and statements about a potential 5GW deployment. That would require 4km sq (1.5 miles squared) of solar array, the company said.

As previously reported by DCD, Starcloud’s proposals make a number of potentially optimistic assumptions about the costs to build and launch large-scale modules into orbit. It claims it will be able to launch a 40MW data center into orbit for just $8.2 million.

The company has raised more than $20m to-date. Investors include Y Combinator, NFX, Fuse.VC, Soma Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia.

The company was due to launch its Starcloud1 demonstrator satellite this summer, but the machine is seemingly yet to launch.

On its website, the company notes plans for its first commercial satellite, Starcloud-2, due to launch next year. The machine will reportedly feature a GPU cluster, persistent storage, and a “proprietary thermal and power systems in a smallsat form factor.”

Founded in 1999 by a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, In-Q-Tel invests in companies that serve US national security interests, with a focus on technologies that help intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI.

Other technology companies funded by In-Q-Tel include quantum computing firms D-Wave, IonQ, Infleqtion, and Xanadu; liquid cooling firm JetCool; containerized data center company Armada; long-term storage company Cerabyte; storage firm NetApp; and OT security firm Nozomi.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/in-q-tel-invests-in-data-center-in-space-firm-starcloud/