DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show Bonus episode - The pathway to compute in space with Sophia Space's Cyrill Glockner
Dec 18, 2025
Cyrill Glockner, VP of Partnerships and Product Strategy at Sophia Space, discusses innovative methods for putting compute infrastructure into Earth orbit. He explains the stepwise approach involving SOFIA tiles, which are modular solar panels with integrated GPUs. Cyrill dives into thermal management strategies, redundancy in GPU design, and the benefits of passive cooling in space. He shares insights on the longevity of tiles, potential market models, and predicts that by 2040, space compute could rival Earth’s capabilities.
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Orbit As An Infrastructure Layer
- Sophia Space aims to make Earth orbit an infrastructure layer for data centers by deploying modular compute tiles.
- Cyrill Glockner describes tiles as 1x1m solar panels with flattened GPU, CPU, memory and comms, enabling orbital supercompute.
Take A Stepwise Path To Scale
- Build incrementally: start with attachable tiles before attempting megastructures in orbit.
- Use early commercial revenue from tile add-ons to fund larger stitched-together megawatt arrays later.
Start With Edge GPUs, Evolve To H100s
- Initial tiles will host multiple low-power GPUs (four per tile) and target inference and edge workloads.
- Over time tiles could evolve to support standard data-center class GPUs as power and form factors improve.