Google just put a refrigerator-sized satellite into space, part of a research project the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun.The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed in data centers on Earth.The chips will run a version of the company's Gemma AI model for 15 minutes at a time due to heat management constraints, using the open weight model to answer simple queries.
In a blog post, Google said the mission will gauge how the TPUs handle "the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space."Use of AI has grown sharply over the last few years, fueling demand for data centers.At Google's annual developer summit in May, CEO Sundar Pichai said demand for AI services exceeds supply and he expects capital expenditures this year to be $180 billion to $190 billion — more than six times as large as in 2022 — as the company builds computing infrastructure and develops chips.At a time when opposition to the proliferation of power-hungry data centers on Earth is growing, Google is one of a handful of companies advancing plans to put them in orbit where there is virtually unlimited free energy and no protesters."The sun puts out almost all of the power in our solar system.
All of the other power sources that humanity has tapped into are just a tiny fraction of a percent," said Travis Beals, senior director and lead of Project Suncatcher."So in some sense, this project is about tapping into the best way to use solar power to run AI compute."The satellite will be in a sun-synchronous orbit where its solar panels will almost never be in the shade.
That eliminates the need for carrying heavy batteries or backup power on the spacecraft.Last November, a venture-backed startup called Starcloud launched a spacecraft that carried an Nvidia H100 chip on board and demonstrated a version of Goo...