The startup Lumen Orbit announced an investment round, during which it plans to raise $2.4 million for the construction of space data centers. According to Datacenter Dynamics, the company hopes to deploy hundreds of low-orbit satellites with GPU-based accelerators that can act as a distributed data center for other spacecraft – in many cases eliminating the need to send data to Earth.
According to company CEO Philip Johnston, Lumen's mission is to launch a constellation of orbital data centers for edge computing in space. Other satellites will send “raw” data to such a space data center for AI processing, after which the finished results will be sent to Earth. This will save the bandwidth of space communication channels and avoid the costly transfer of data arrays back and forth, and even with a high latency.
The company expects to deploy 300 satellites at an altitude of about 315 km. They intend to send a test 60-kg copy as early as May 2025 using the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The startup cooperates with Ansys and Solidworks, several memorandums of understanding worth more than $30 million have already been signed and there is even a first potential client who is ready to try the system in a test mode. Six months after the test, eight satellites are planned to be launched, and after another six months, five orbital “rings” should appear.
Lumen is the latest in a wave of companies looking to put computing power in orbit. Axiom Space plans to launch a data center on its space station in 2026, and NTT and SKY Perfect JSAT hope to deploy satellites for data storage and processing as early as 2025. Blue Origin intends to launch a large computing system-tug Blue Ring, but in this case we are talking about a geosynchronous, not a low-orbit project. The concept of extraterrestrial data centers is also being studied in the European Union, and ESA is collaborating with Intel and Ubotica on the AI cubesat PhiSat-1.
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