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The agreement, valid until March 2026 and extendable by mutual consent, enhances volume visibility and strengthens A-1’s position in speciality chemicals. View More

Waaree scales Samakhiali manufacturing facility to a total annual capacity of 3 GW with the addition View More

Shakti Pumps shares surged 14.25% to ?629 after winning a significant order for 16,025 solar pumps from Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company. Despite recent declines, the company's order book reached ?13,000 crore, with growing demand from international markets. View More

The company's Starcloud-1 satellite is running Gemma, an open model from Google, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been trained in outer space. View More

In this articleNVDAFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT The Starcloud-1 satellite is launched into space from a SpaceX rocket on November 2, 2025.Courtesy: SpaceX | Starcloud Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud trained an artificial intelligence model from space for the first time, signaling a new era for orbital data centers that could alleviate Earth's escalating digital infrastructure crisis. Last month, the Washington-based company launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit, sending a chip into outer space that's 100 times more powerful than any GPU compute that has been in space before. Now, the company's Starcloud-1 satellite is running and querying responses from Gemma, an open large language model from Google, in orbit, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been run on a high-powered Nvidia GPU in outer space, CNBC has learned. "Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you — a fascinating collection of blue and green," reads a message from the recently launched satellite. "Let's see what wonders this view of your world holds. I'm Gemma, and I'm here to observe, analyze, and perhaps, occasionally offer a slightly unsettlingly insightful commentary. Let's begin!" the model wrote. Starcloud's output Gemma in space. Gemma is a family of open models built from the same technology used to create Google's Gemini AI models.Starcloud Starcloud wants to show outer space can be a hospitable environment for data centers, particularly as Earth-based facilities strain power grids, consume billions of gallons of water annually and produce hefty greenhouse gas emissions. The electricity consumption of data centers is projected to more than double by 2030, according to data from the International Energy Agency.Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that the company's orbital data centers will have 10 times lower energy costs than terrestrial data centers."Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I'm expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we're facing on energy terrestrially," Johnston said in an interview.Johnston, who co-founded the startup in 2024, said Starcloud-1's operation of Gemma is proof that space-based data centers can exist and operate a variety of AI models in the future, particularly those that require large compute clusters. "This very powerful, very parameter dense model is living on our satellite," Johnston said. "We can query it, and it will respond in the same way that when you query a chat from a database on Earth, it will give you a very sophisticated response. We can do that with our satellite."In a statement to CNBC, Tris Warkentin, product director at Google DeepMind, said that "seeing Gemma run in the harsh environment of space is a testament to the flexibility and robustness of open models." In addition to Gemma, Starcloud was able to train NanoGPT, an LLM created by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, on the H100 chip using the complete works of Shakespeare. This led the model to speak in Shakespearean English. Orbital compute offers a way forward that respects both technological ambition and environmental responsibility. When Starcloud-1 looked down, it saw a world of blue and green. Our responsibility is to keep it that way.Philip JohnstonStarcloud CEO Starcloud — a member of the Nvidia Inception program and graduate from Y Combinator and the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator — plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with solar and cooling panels that measure roughly 4 kilometers in both width and height. A compute cluster of that gigawatt size would produce more power than the largest power plant in the U.S. and would be substantially smaller and cheaper than a terrestrial solar farm of the same capacity, according to Starcloud's white paper.These data centers in space would capture constant solar energy to power next-generation AI models, unhindered by the Earth's day and night cycles and weather changes. Starcloud's satellites should have a five-year lifespan given the expected lifetime of the Nvidia chips on its architecture, Johnston said. Orbital data centers would have real-world commercial and military use cases. Already, Starcloud's systems can enable real-time intelligence and, for example, spot the thermal signature of a wildfire the moment it ignites and immediately alert first responders, Johnston said. "We've linked in the telemetry of the satellite, so we linked in the vital signs that it's drawing from the sensors — things like altitude, orientation, location, speed," Johnston said. "You can ask it, 'Where are you now?' and it will say 'I'm above Africa and in 20 minutes, I'll be above the Middle East.' And you could also say, 'What does it feel like to be a satellite? And it will say, 'It's kind of a bit weird.' ... It'll give you an interesting answer that you could only have with a very high-powered model."Starcloud is working on customer workloads by running inference on satellite imagery from observation company Capella Space, which could help spot lifeboats from capsized vessels at sea and forest fires in a certain location. The company will include several Nvidia H100 chips and integrate Nvidia's Blackwell platform onto its next satellite launch in October 2026 to offer greater AI performance. The satellite launching next year will feature a module running a cloud platform from cloud infrastructure startup Crusoe, allowing customers to deploy and operate AI workloads from space. "Running advanced AI from space solves the critical bottlenecks facing data centers on Earth," Johnston told CNBC. "Orbital compute offers a way forward that respects both technological ambition and environmental responsibility. When Starcloud-1 looked down, it saw a world of blue and green. Our responsibility is to keep it that way," he added. The risks Risks in operating orbital data centers remain, however. Analysts from Morgan Stanley have noted that orbital data centers could face hurdles such as harsh radiation, difficulty of in-orbit maintenance, debris hazards, and regulatory issues tied to data governance and space traffic. Still, tech giants are pursuing orbital data centers given the prospect of nearly limitless solar energy and greater, gigawatt-sized operations in space.Along with Starcloud and Nvidia's efforts, several companies have announced space-based data center missions. On Nov. 4, Google unveiled a "moonshot" initiative titled Project Suncatcher, which aims to put solar-powered satellites into space with Google's tensor processing units. Privately owned Lonestar Data Holdings is working to put the first-ever commercial lunar data center on the moon's surface. Aetherflux, founded by former Robinhood co-founder and chief executive Baiju Bhatt, on Tuesday announced a target to deploy an orbital data center satellite in the first quarter of 2027.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has notably explored an acquisition or partnership with a rocket maker, suggesting a desire to compete against Elon Musk's SpaceX, according to The Wall Street Journal. SpaceX is a key launch partner for Starcloud.Referring to Starcloud's launch in early November, Dion Harris, senior director of AI infrastructure at Nvidia, said: "From one small data center, we've taken a giant leap toward a future where orbital computing harnesses the infinite power of the sun."

Waaree has domestic capacity of 19.7 GW and 2.6 GW in the US, taking the total capacity to 22.3GW globally View More

The order, previously disclosed to stock exchanges on December 5, marks the first US deployment of Waaree’s 620-Wp bifacial solar modules View More

Only two data embassies currently exist, but Saudi Arabia is looking to make them commonplace. View More

As countries race to build domestic data centers in the name of sovereign AI, Saudi Arabia is betting on a more creative idea: data embassies. A data embassy is where data is stored outside of a country's physical borders but operates under its laws, much like a diplomatic embassy.  The concept is not new. Estonia established the first data embassy in 2017 and there's only been one other since, from Monaco. Both embassies are in Luxembourg and hold a backup of the countries' critical data, set up as a security measure against cyber and climate risks.  As AI scales, the concept could gain momentum as a way to build data centers overseas — in places that have plenty of resources and power, given energy is one of Europe's biggest bottlenecks in building AI infrastructure — while still operating within the laws of the developer's country.  At least, that's what Saudi Arabia is counting on as it positions itself as an exporter of data rather than oil. Saudi Arabia is betting hard on solar energy, but its water resources — needed to cool data centers — are scarce, dousing the idea in doubt. It comes as the country battles its neighbors to become an AI hub as global investors and tech firms turn to the Middle East for its deep pockets and influx of talent, representing a potential shift in global power. Data embassy dealmaking   Getting data embassies up and running would be tricky in practice as they require bilateral international agreements on jurisdiction and there is currently no relevant legal framework in place, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford, told CNBC. The guest country and host state would have to agree on assurances that neither party is violating the terms of the agreement, Mayer-Schönberger, said. However, this will ultimately "depend on the trust of the parties involved," he added. Saudi Arabia, however, has set its sights on becoming the first G20 country to introduce such a framework. In April, its Global AI Hub Law draft set out three levels of data embassies, ranging from the guest country retaining full autonomy to hybrid legal protections where Saudi courts could assist foreign courts.  It is another example of how the AI race could reshape geopolitics as the Kingdom cozies up to the U.S. There has been no indication of the U.S. being a preferred partner for data embassies, but the pair has established a "Strategic Artificial Intelligence Partnership" with Saudi Arabia that includes the "building and developing advanced AI infrastructure." When asked whether the concept could solve tensions around ByteDance's TikTok, where the U.S. feared its citizens' data was being accessed by the Chinese government and used to influence voters ahead of the 2024 election, Mayer-Schönberger was not convinced.  "It would require a complex bilateral treaty between China and the US that would take very long to negotiate; moreover, given the distrust between the two nations, it is hard to imagine that the US would trust China to keep the data off limits," he said. Big Tech firms Google and Microsoft already offer their cloud computing customers with local data centers hosted in Europe for sensitive data, as well as a special governance structure designed to limit U.S. government access to that data. "Whether such arrangements would actually protect the data from access remains to be seen, however," Mayer-Schönberger said. Pressing concerns, waning globalization   While concerns of data sovereignty have come into focus as globalization backslides and fresh emphasis is put on national security and economic competitiveness, there is little clarity on how regulations will evolve when it comes to embassies.Sovereignty is an undefined term, noted Nathalie Barrera, who heads up privacy and data regulations in the EMEA region at Palo Alto Networks. "Everyone's talking about it, but no one has defined it, meaning sovereignty for France looks different than sovereignty for Spain," she told CNBC. Palo Alto Networks' customers care about three things: autonomy, which involves the protection of data, understanding who has access, and control; digital resilience to ensure uninterrupted services; and foreign government data access.  Barrera sees data embassies falling in the middle category, especially in the context of Estonia and Monaco.   watch nowVIDEO6:5806:58Groq CEO: Middle East is the 'ideal place' for data centersSquawk Box Europe "This is not unsimilar than the extra territoriality effect of GDPR," she said, noting that there can be data in the U.S. that is still subject to European laws. "And so, this is just a different option or a setup to protect certain categories of data, which, from my understanding, it's pretty much sensitive data that the government needs to hold, such as tax information, health information, administrative information, from its citizens and employees," she added. Part of Saudi Arabia's lure is its cost, as land for data centers is significantly cheaper, as is power and capital. The country is well positioned geographically as a connection between Europe, the Middle East and Asia.  "It makes sense if Saudi Arabia can offer data centre services at a lower cost than countries that need them," said Hortense Bioy, head of sustainable investing research at Morningstar Sustainalytics.   Read moreU.S. greenlights AI chip exports to Gulf tech giants after Saudi Crown Prince’s Washington visitInside the Gulf’s trillion-dollar AI gambleRay Dalio says Middle East is becoming a ‘Silicon Valley of capitalists’ However, "the rise of data centres introduces new ESG considerations which are now widely recognised, with carbon emissions and water intensity among the most pressing concerns."  While the sun is plentiful in the arid state, its grid is still largely powered by fossil fuels. Around 64% of Saudi Arabia's total energy supply was from oil in 2023, according to International Energy Agency data, suggesting in this case the trade-off for sovereignty could be sustainability.  In all, Mayer-Schönberger remains skeptical on the potential for data embassies to become the next big thing. "The nation state remains too powerful and globalization is waning," he said. 

Currently, for the company, around 15% of the total order book comprises export orders, and the US is the only overseas market View More

The group is also expanding its defence manufacturing footprint through joint ventures with Dassault and Thales, covering aerospace assemblies, avionics, radar systems and electronics View More

The facility will bridge large demand-supply gap as India will need 55–60 GW of solar modules annually by 2030, while upstream capacity remains significantly short View More