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Starcloud wants to build a data centre satellite that is 4 kilometres by 4 kilometres<\/p>\n
Starcloud<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Could AI\u2019s insatiable thirst<\/a> for colossal data centres be fixed by launching them into space? Tech companies are eyeing low Earth orbit as a potential solution, but researchers say it\u2019s unlikely in the near future due to a mountain of difficult and unsolved engineering issues.<\/p>\n The huge demand <\/a>for, and investment in, generative AI products like ChatGPT has created an unprecedented need for computing power, which requires both vast amounts of space and gigawatts of power, equivalent to that used by millions of homes. As a result, data centres are increasingly fuelled by unsustainable sources, like natural gas, with tech companies arguing that renewable power can neither produce the amount of power needed nor the consistency required for reliable use.<\/p>\n To solve this, tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have suggested launching data centres into orbit, where they could be powered by solar panels with constant access to a higher level of sunlight than on Earth. Earlier this year, Bezos, who alongside founding Amazon also owns space company Blue Origin, said that he envisions gigawatt data centres in space within 10 to 20 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n Google has more concrete and accelerated plans for data centres in space, with a pilot program called Project Suncatcher aiming to launch two prototype satellites carrying its TPU AI chips in 2027. Perhaps the most advanced experiment in data processing in space so far, however, was the launch of a single H100 graphics processing unit this year by an Nvidia-backed company called Starcloud.<\/p>\n This is nowhere near enough computing power to run modern AI systems. OpenAI, for example, is thought to have a million such chips at its disposal, but\u00a0reaching this scale in orbit will require tech firms to tackle a number of unsolved challenges. \u201cFrom an academic research perspective, [space data centres] are nowhere near production level,\u201d says Benjamin Lee<\/a> at the University of Pennsylvania, US.<\/p>\n One of the largest problems with no obvious solution is the sheer physical size necessitated by AI\u2019s computational demand, says Lee. This is both because of the amount of power that would be needed from solar panels, which would require a vast surface area, and the necessity of radiating away heat produced by the chips, which is the only option for cooling in space, where there is no air. \u201cYou\u2019re not able to evaporatively cool them like you are on Earth, blowing cool air over them,\u201d says Lee.<\/p>\n \u201cSquare kilometres of area will be used independently for both the energy, but also for the cooling,\u201d says Lee. \u201cThese things get pretty big, pretty quickly. When you talk about 1000 megawatts of capacity, that\u2019s a lot of real estate in space.\u201d Indeed, Starcloud says it plans to build a 5000 megawatt data centre that would span 16 square kilometres, or about 400 times the area of the solar panels on the International Space Station.<\/p>\n There are some promising technologies that could reduce this requirement, says Krishna Muralidharan<\/a> at the University of Arizona, US, such as thermoelectric devices that can convert heat back into electricity and increase the efficiency of chips operating in space. \u201cIt\u2019s not a problem, it\u2019s a challenge,\u201d he says. \u201cRight now, we can solve it by using these large radiator panels, but ultimately it requires much more sophisticated solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n But space is a very different environment from Earth in other ways, too, including the abundance of high-energy radiation that could hit computer chips and upset calculations by inducing errors. \u201cIt\u2019s going to slow everything down,\u201d says Lee. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to restart the computation, you\u2019re going to have to recover and correct those errors, so there is likely a performance discount for the same chip in space than there is deploying on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n The scale would also require flying thousands of satellites together, says Muralidharan, which would need extremely precise laser systems to communicate between the data centres and with Earth, where the light would be partially scrambled by the atmosphere. But Muralidharan is optimistic that these aren\u2019t fundamental problems and could be solved eventually. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of when and not if,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Another uncertainty is whether AI will still require such huge computational resources by the time space data centres are available, especially if the projected advances in AI capability don\u2019t scale with increasing computational firepower, which there are some early signs<\/a> of. \u201cIt\u2019s a distinct possibility that the training requirements will peak or level off, and then demand for massive, larger-scale data centres will also peak and level off,\u201d says Lee.<\/p>\n There could, however, still be uses for space-based data centres in this scenario, says Muralidharan, such as for supporting space exploration on the moon or in the solar system, or for making observations of Earth.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Starcloud wants to build a data centre satellite that is 4 kilometres by 4 kilometres Starcloud Could AI\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-193819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}