PHILIP JOHNSTON
AI INFRASTRUCTURE
PHILIP JOHNSTON
TITLE: CEO COMPANY: STARCLOUD
INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY AND SPACE INDUSTRIES
Philip Johnston, Starcloud’ s Co-founder and CEO, pioneers space-based data centers for AI energy challenges. He is an ex-McKinsey space consultant with degrees from Harvard, Wharton and Columbia.
The platform eliminates the need for physical land, conventional cooling or grid connections, according to the company – addressing some of the constraints that have limited data centre expansion in recent years. The satellite launching in 2026 will host a Crusoe Cloud module, enabling customers to deploy AI workloads from space.
Starcloud states the design is capable of handling inference and training workloads. Inference refers to running data through a trained AI model to make predictions, while training involves teaching a model to recognise patterns in data – both processes require substantial computing power and have driven much of the recent surge in GPU demand.
Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud, says:“ Having Crusoe as the foundational cloud provider on our platform is a perfect alignment of vision and execution.
“ Crusoe’ s expertise in building rugged, efficient and scalable computing solutions makes them the ideal partner to pioneer this new era.
“ Together, we are building not just a data centre in space, but a new category of cloud computing that will unlock extraordinary possibilities for research, discovery and innovation.”
On Earth, Crusoe uses flared natural gas and renewable energy sources to power data centres, reducing waste emissions from energy production. The company plans to apply similar energy optimisation principles to operations in space, though the technical challenges of maintaining computing infrastructure in orbit are considerable and largely untested at commercial scale.
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