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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s AI accelerator chips designed for training, content generation, synthetic speech and vision, and predictive modeling. Google calls these chips Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.<\/p>\n
\u201cProject 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,\u201d Google wrote in a blog post.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cLike any moonshot, it\u2019s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,\u201d Google\u2019s CEO, Sundar Pichai, wrote on X<\/a>. Pichai noted that Google\u2019s early tests show the company\u2019s TPUs can withstand the intense radiation they will encounter in space. \u201cHowever, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability.\u201d<\/p>\n The why and how<\/p>\n Ars reported on Google\u2019s announcement<\/a> on Tuesday, and Google published a research paper<\/a> outlining the motivation for such a moonshot project. One of the authors, Travis Beals, spoke with Ars about Project Suncatcher\u00a0and offered his thoughts on why it just might work.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re just seeing so much demand from people for AI,\u201d said Beals, senior director of Paradigms of Intelligence, a research team within Google. \u201cSo, we wanted to figure out a solution for compute that could work no matter how large demand might grow.\u201d<\/p>\n