It was probably always when, not if, Google would add its name to the list of companies intrigued by the potential of orbiting data centers.
Google announced Tuesday a new initiative, named Project Suncatcher, to examine the feasibility of bringing artificial intelligence to space. The idea is to deploy swarms of satellites in low-Earth orbit, each carrying Google’s AI accelerator chips designed for training, content generation, synthetic speech and vision, and predictive modeling. Google calls these chips Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.
“Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space,” Google wrote in a blog post.
“Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, wrote on X. Pichai noted that Google’s early tests show the company’s TPUs can withstand the intense radiation they will encounter in space. “However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability.”
Like you could maybe reengineer the systems and prioritize reliability, but like, that’s expensive, you’re not just doing plug and play at that point. There are also concerns about higher failure and error rates from cosmic rays and stuff. Like they could keep it inside the magnetic field and keep the orbit out of the van allen belts, but, the ISS does that and they still need specific ruggedized computers and quad backups for even normal usage.
Like, it’s going to need more maintenance and upkeep than a normal data center would, with higher turn over of parts, OR, redesigning all the parts to be ruggedized and super redundant, which is a whole other new cost to add to everything else.
Hell NASA still uses a ruggadized Variant of power PC CPU straight out of 2000 Mac’s on their beyond earth probes because ruggedizing a modern chip is just to much effort and work.