We characterized the optical absorption and solar cell characteristics of high‐density InAs self‐assembled quantum dots (QDs) grown on GaAs (001) substrates by atomic hydrogen‐assisted molecular beam epitaxy. The GaNAs material can be used as strain‐compensating layer (SCL) thereby minimizing the net strain, and thus is advantageous for multi‐stacking of InAs QDs structures. As a result, dislocations and coalesced islands were not observed in 100 layer‐stacked QDs. For QD solar cell characterization, the short‐circuit current density of QDSC increases with increasing number of QD stacks, and reaches as high as 26.4 mA/cm2 for 50 layer‐stacked sample under air‐mass 1.5 condition. However, the light absorption by QD superlattice as determined by optical absorption measurements at is limited to ∼ 10% even for 100 layer‐stacked samples. (© 2011 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)