The tech industry is on a tear, building data centers for AI as quickly as they can buy up the land. The sky-high energy costs and logistical headaches of managing all those data centers have prompted interest in space-based infrastructure. Moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have mused about putting GPUs in space, and now Google confirms it’s working on its own version of the technology. The company’s latest “moonshot” is known as Project Suncatcher, and if all goes as planned, Google hopes it will lead to scalable networks of orbiting TPUs.
The space around Earth has changed a lot in the last few years. A new generation of satellite constellations like Starlink has shown it’s feasible to relay Internet communication via orbital systems. Deploying high-performance AI accelerators in space along similar lines would be a boon to the industry’s never-ending build-out. Google notes that space may be “the best place to scale AI compute.”
Google’s vision for scalable orbiting data centers relies on solar-powered satellites with free-space optical links connecting the nodes into a distributed network. Naturally, there are numerous engineering challenges to solve before Project Suncatcher is real. As a reference, Google points to the long road from its first moonshot self-driving cars 15 years ago to the Waymo vehicles that are almost fully autonomous today.
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