Google aims for the stars - literally - with new 'moonshot' project

Google is jumping on board the space-based mission to put data centers into Earth's orbit to harness the infinite energy of the Sun.

Google aims for the stars - literally - with new 'moonshot' project
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Tech and Science Editor
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TL;DR: Google's Project Suncatcher aims to develop space-based data centers to leverage unlimited solar energy and the vacuum of space as a natural heatsink, reducing energy costs significantly. Overcoming challenges like high-speed satellite connections and radiation-hardened hardware is key to scaling AI compute off Earth.

Google is joining in on the recent push to get data centers off Earth and into orbit in an effort to harness the endless solar energy of the Sun.

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It was only recently that NVIDIA announced that a company called Starcloud is sending NVIDIA's AI GPUs to space, marking a moment in history when it comes to space-based compute, as the Starcloud-1 satellite offers 100x more GPU compute than any previous space-based operation. Why are companies looking to space for data centers? There are a few simple reasons.

The vacuum of space acts as an infinite heatsink, and the solar energy produced by the Sun is endless and free. Just those two facts combined mean energy costs in space will be 10x cheaper than land-based operations, even when including the cost to launch the data center, according to Starcloud. Google has now recognized the potential of space-based data centers with its announcement of a "moonshot" research project called "Project Suncatcher".

"In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute," Travis Beals, a Google senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence

As with anything that has yet to be done at scale, Project Suncatcher has a few hurdles that will need to be overcome first. One is the connection between satellites needing to "support tens of terabits per second" in order to provide a connection speed that is comparable to data centers on land, and hardware being able to withstand higher levels of radiation in space.

According to the company, it has already tested Trillium Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for radiation tolerance and found they can "survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5-year mission life without permanent failures."