Starcloud, an Nvidia-backed orbital knowledge heart startup, mentioned it’ll begin mining Bitcoin from house later this 12 months when its second spacecraft is launched, positioning it to develop into the primary firm to mine Bitcoin off Earth.
Starcloud “would be the first to mine Bitcoin in house,” the startup’s CEO, Philip Johnston, posted to X on Saturday after revealing its Bitcoin mining ambitions in house in an interview with HyperChange on Thursday.
Within the interview, Johnston mentioned operating Bitcoin application-specific built-in circuit (ASIC) miners could be “one of the vital compelling use circumstances” of house compute attributable to it being considerably cheaper than GPUs.
“GPUs are about 30 instances dearer per kilowatt or per watt than ASICs,” Johnston mentioned. “A 1-kilowatt B200 chip, it may cost a little $30,000. A 1-kilowatt ASIC is like $1,000.”
Clip on Bitcoin mining pic.twitter.com/WXlp1BMya1
— Philip Johnston (@PhilipJohnston) March 8, 2026
Within the X publish, Johnston mentioned Bitcoin mining in house will develop into a “large trade” attributable to how way more economical it’s than mining the cryptocurrency on Earth.
“Bitcoin mining consumes about 20 GW of energy constantly. It is not sensible to do that on Earth, and ultimately state, all of this might be accomplished in house.”
Starcloud was based in early 2024 to construct knowledge facilities in house as an answer to handle rising power wants for AI. In November, it launched a satellite tv for pc with an NVIDIA H100 into orbit, marking the primary time a GPU that highly effective has ever operated in house.
Its knowledge facilities, which comprise round 88,000 satellites, are primarily powered by photo voltaic power.
Sending Bitcoin to Mars
Whereas Johnston’s Starcloud envisions mining Bitcoin in house, tech entrepreneurs Jose E. Puente and Carlos Puente final 12 months got here up with an answer to ship it throughout planets.
In September, Puente advised Cointelegraph that it’s theoretically doable to ship Bitcoin to Mars in as quick as three minutes by leveraging an optical hyperlink from NASA or Starlink and a brand new interplanetary timestamping system.
Whereas somebody would must be there to obtain it, the Bitcoin transaction would transfer by way of house stations — akin to antennas and satellites — or perhaps a relay across the Moon earlier than reaching Mars.
They, nonetheless, mentioned that mining Bitcoin on Mars wouldn’t be possible because of the latency between the 2 planets.
Associated: Bitcoin drops 2% as oil costs surge on power scarcity fears
Bitcoin mining profitability margins have thinned over the previous few months, significantly attributable to Bitcoin’s (BTC) worth falling almost 48% from its $126,080 excessive on Oct. 6.
Nonetheless, the Bitcoin mining problem has fallen 7% from a document 155.9 trillion items in November to 145 trillion, giving miners some much-needed respiration room for now.
Journal: The talk over Bitcoin’s four-year cycle is over: Benjamin Cowen
