I’ve been following the AI hardware race pretty closely—comes with the territory when you work in IT—but I’ll admit the latest announcement about StarCloud planning to launch GPUs into space had me doing a double-take over my morning latte. The idea of a 4-kilometre-wide, 5-gigawatt datacenter orbiting Earth sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi novel, and honestly, I’m not entirely convinced it’s anything more than that.

Let me be clear from the start: this isn’t actually NVIDIA launching GPUs into space, despite what the initial buzz suggested. StarCloud is a startup that’s part of NVIDIA’s Inception program, which is essentially a support network for companies building on NVIDIA tech. The distinction matters because it shifts this from “tech giant’s ambitious project” to “startup’s moonshot pitch,” and those two things have very different probabilities of success.