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

Google has envisioned a potential new way to circumvent the resource constraints of power-hungry AI data centers on Earth: by launching its AI chips into space on solar-powered satellites. This is a “Moonshot” research project that Google announced today called Project Suncatcher.

If it ever gets off the ground, the project would essentially create space data centers. Google hopes to harness solar power 24 hours a day. The dream is to harness a near-limitless source of clean energy that could allow the company to pursue its AI ambitions without the concerns its data centers on Earth raise about rising power plant emissions and utility bills due to growing demand for electricity.

“In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI computing,” Travis Beals, senior director of Paradigms of Intelligence at Google, wrote in a blog post today. The company also published a preliminary paper, which has not undergone academic peer review, detailing its progress so far on this project.

There are major hurdles Google will have to overcome to make this plan a reality, as it explains in the blog and journal. Google envisions its tensor processing units (TPUs) orbiting Earth on satellites equipped with solar panels that could produce electricity almost continuously, making them eight times more productive than similar panels on Earth, according to Google.

A major challenge will be to ensure that satellites can communicate well with each other. To compete with terrestrial data centers, “requires links between satellites supporting tens of terabits per second,” Google writes. Maneuvering satellite constellations into tight formations can help them achieve this, perhaps by flying satellites “kilometers or less” from each other. That’s much closer than satellites operate today, and already space debris from collisions is a growing risk.

Additionally, Google needs to ensure that its TPUs can withstand higher radiation levels in space. The company has tested the radiation tolerance of its Trillium TPUs and claims that they “survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5-year mission life without permanent failures.”

It would be quite expensive to send these TPUs to space at the moment. But a cost analysis by the company 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, per kilowatt/year, by the mid-2030s. Google says it is planning a joint mission with the company Planet to launch a few prototype satellites by 2027 to test its hardware in orbit.