Google has a ‘moonshot’ plan for AI data centers in space

Google has dreamed up a potential new way to overcome the resource constraints of power-hungry AI data centers on Earth, by launching its AI chips into space on solar-powered satellites. It’s a cool research project that Google announced today called Project Suncatcher.

If it can get off the ground, the project will essentially create space-based data centers. Google hopes that through this it will be able to harness solar energy around the clock. The dream is to harness a nearly limitless source of clean energy that might allow the company to chase its AI ambitions without the concerns raised by its on-the-ground data centers when it comes to power plant emissions and utility bills being increased by rising electricity demand.

“In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI computing,” Travis Bales, one of Google’s senior managers for intelligence modeling, wrote in a blog post today. The company also published a preliminary research paper, which has not been subject to academic peer review, detailing the progress it has made so far in this endeavor.

There are significant hurdles Google must overcome to make this plan a reality, which it explains in the blog and paper. Google envisions its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) orbiting Earth on satellites equipped with solar panels that could generate electricity almost continuously, making them eight times more productive than similar panels on Earth, according to Google.

The main challenge will be ensuring that the satellites can communicate well with each other. Competing with data centers on the ground “requires inter-satellite links supporting tens of terabytes per second,” Google wrote. Maneuvering groups of satellites in tight formations could help them achieve this, perhaps flying the satellites at a distance of “kilometres or less” from each other. This is much closer than satellites operate today, and space junk from collisions represents an increasing danger.

Furthermore, Google has to make sure that its TPU materials can withstand higher levels of radiation in space. It has tested its Trillium TPU material to withstand radiation and says it “withstands a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5-year mission life without permanent failure.”

Sending these TPUs into space right now would be very expensive. But the company’s cost analysis suggests that launching and operating a data center in space could become “roughly comparable” to the energy costs of an equivalent data center on Earth on a kilowatt-year basis by the mid-2030s. Google says it plans a joint mission with Planet to launch two prototype satellites by 2027 in order to test its hardware in orbit.