Hot on the heels of Starlink’s plan for a million data centers in space, Starcloud’s next launch will put hardware from AWS in orbit.

“Starcloud will be the first to launch the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outpost hardware to space on our second satellite launching in October,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston wrote in a LinkedIn post. Outpost is AWS’s on-premises private cloud offering.

Starcloud put an Nvidia H100 GPU in space aboard its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in October 2025. Chinese company Guoxing Aerospace had already launched a computing network into space a year earlier, and since then Starlink and Google have indicated that they plan to follow suit.

One executive skeptical of the idea of data centers in space is AWS’s own CEO, Matt Garman. “There are not enough rockets to launch a million satellites yet, so we’re, like, pretty far from that. If you think about the cost of getting a payload in space today, it’s massive,” Garman told attendees at the Cisco AI summit, according to a Reuters report.

Garman is just one of many critics of the notion that data centers can be a viable alternative. Issues such as collisions with space debris, the difficulty of supplying water as a coolant, the impossibility of fixing hardware issues and latency have all been highlighted as potential problems.

This article first appeared on Network World.