Sophia Space raises $10 million to showcase new space computers

As aerospace companies seek to push the most advanced chips into orbit, the problem of cooling those high-powered processors is at the top of their list of priorities.

“It’s cold in space… [but] “There’s no airflow, so the only way to dissipate is through conduction,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said when asked about space data centers during his company’s most recent earnings call.

Now, Sophia Space has raised $10 million from investors, including Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The company plans to demonstrate a new approach to passive cooling for space computers on Earth, then purchase a space bus from Apex Space and demonstrate it operating in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.

Companies like SpaceX, Google or Starcloud are studying traditional satellite form factors for proposed space-based data center clusters, which rely on large radiators to keep the chips in optimal thermal condition. But Sophia Space’s founders — CTO Leon Alkalai, CEO Rob DeMillo, and Chief Growth Officer Brian Monnin — have a different approach.

The company’s technology comes from an unusual source: a $100 million program at the California Institute of Technology to develop orbital solar power plants that would transmit electricity to the Earth below. The researchers eventually settled on a sail-like structure, which is thin and flexible compared to traditional satellites.

While technical and regulatory challenges make producing electricity for Earth difficult, Al-Qalai, a fellow at the Caltech-run Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was struck by the idea of ​​using the design to power space processors. (Aetherflux, a space solar startup, had a similar realization.)

Sophia, an Nvidia partner, has designed modular server racks with embedded solar panels that she calls TILES, which are one meter by one meter and a few centimeters deep. By adopting this thin form factor, DeMillo says the processors can rest against a passive heat spreader, eliminating the need for active cooling. It is expected that 92% of the energy it generates will go to processing, which is a huge gain over traditional designs. However, this design requires a sophisticated software management system to balance activity across processors.

By the 2030s, SOFIA hopes to build space-based data centers larger than thousands of tiles, envisioning a 50-meter-by-50-meter structure that would provide 1 megawatt of computing power. DeMelo argues that trying to build space data centers with less efficient systems would not be economical, and that creating a single architecture rather than a distributed network tied to a laser would be easier to implement.

However, SOFIA first plans to start offering its TILE modules to satellite operators who need in-orbit computational solutions. Potential partners include Earth observation satellites that collect large amounts of sensor data, missile warning and tracking systems that the Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to build, or even increasingly complex communications networks.

“The dirty little secret of the satellite industry is that we have all these amazing sensors out there that produce terabytes, or even petabytes, of data every few minutes, and they throw away most of it because they can’t do the computing on board and they can’t go back and forth to the surface fast enough,” DeMillo told TechCrunch.