OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is thinking about expanding to the final frontier for data centers, and his efforts to follow through on that thought reportedly turned into talks with Stoke Space, a rocket startup headquartered just south of Seattle.
The talks with Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space began this summer and picked up in the fall, but are no longer active, according to an account published by The Wall Street Journal.
Altman’s quest would open up a new front in his competition with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who recently talked about scaling up Starlink V3 satellites to serve as orbital data centers for AI applications. “SpaceX will be doing this,” he wrote in a post to his X social-media platform.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the Blue Origin space venture, has voiced a similar interest in orbital data centers — as has Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google is partnering with Planet Labs on a space-based data processing effort known as Project Suncatcher.
The tech world’s appetite for data processing and storage is being driven by the rapidly growing resource requirements of artificial intelligence applications. Altman addressed the subject on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast in July.
“I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time,” Altman said. “But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, ‘Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.’”
According to unidentified sources quoted by the Journal, Altman was exploring the idea of investing in space ventures to follow through on that thought. Stoke Space, which is working on a fully reusable rocket called Nova, reportedly became a focus of Altman’s interest.
Much has changed on the AI frontier in recent weeks. OpenAI is facing a strong challenge from Google and its Gemini chatbot — and this week, Altman ordered the company to refocus urgently on upgrading ChatGPT, its flagship AI platform. Such down-to-earth market concerns may have been one of the factors putting Altman’s space aspirations on hold.
A spokesperson for Stoke Space declined to comment on the Journal’s report.
There’s another Seattle-area space venture that may well offer the kind of play that Altman is looking for: Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud is developing its own platform for AI data centers in space. Like Stoke Space, Starcloud went through the startup accelerator program at Y Combinator, which Altman ran for a time before he became OpenAI’s CEO.
Last month, Starcloud had its first test satellite launched into space with an Nvidia data-processing chip on board. The startup is partnering with a Colorado-based company called Crusoe to offer limited GPU processing capacity in space by early 2027.
