As space companies itch to push the most advanced chips into orbit, the problem of cooling those high-powered processors is top of mind.

“It’s cold in space … [but] there’s no airflow, and so the only way to dissipate is through conduction,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said when asked about space-based data centers during his firm’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 prove out a new approach to passively cooling space computers on the ground, then buy a satellite bus from Apex Space and show that it works in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.

Companies like SpaceX, Google, or Starcloud are examining traditional satellite form factors for their proposed space data center constellations, which rely on large radiators to keep 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 tech comes from an unusual source: a $100-million-endowed program at Caltech to develop orbital solar plants that would beam electricity to Earth below. The researchers ultimately settled on a sail-like structure that is thin and flexible compared to boxy, traditional satellites.

While technical and regulatory challenges make producing electricity for Earth difficult, Alkalai, a fellow at the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was struck by the idea of using the design to power space-based processors.

(Aetherflux, a space solar power startup, has had a similar realization. )

Sophia, an Nvidia partner, has designed modular server racks with integrated solar panels it calls TILES, which are 1 meter by 1 meter in area and a few centimeters in depth.

By adopting this thin form factor, DeMillo says that processors can sit against a passive heat spreader, eliminating the need for active cooling.

He expects 92% of the power it generates will go to processing, a significant gain on traditional designs.

This design requires, however, a sophisticated software management system to balance activity across the processors.

By the 2030s, Sophia hopes to be building larger space data centers out of thousands of TILEs, envisioning a 50-meter-by-50-meter structure delivering 1 MW of computing power.

DeMillo argues that attempting to build space data centers with less efficient systems will not be economical and that a single structure rather than a distributed network linked by lasers will be easier to execute.

First, however, Sophia plans to begin by offering its TILEs to satellite operators that require compute solutions on orbit.

Potential partners include Earth-observation satellites collecting 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 we’ve got all these amazing sensors up there that produce terabytes, or even petabytes, of data every few minutes, and they throw most of it out because they can’t do the computing on board and they can’t get round trip back and forth to the surface fast enough,” DeMillo told TechCrunch

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