Google has unveiled an ambitious initiative to tackle the energy demands of AI data centers by launching AI chips into space aboard solar-powered satellites. This innovative endeavor, known as Project Suncatcher, was announced today and represents a bold step in addressing earthly resource limitations.

The vision behind the project is to establish data centers in space, where they can continuously harness solar energy. Google aims to utilize this abundant and clean power source to fuel its AI advancements, thereby mitigating the environmental impact and high electricity costs associated with terrestrial data centers.

Travis Beals, a senior director at Google focusing on Paradigms of Intelligence, shared insights in a blog post, suggesting that space might be the ideal environment for scaling AI computing in the future. Accompanying the announcement is a detailed preprint paper outlining the project’s current status, though it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The realization of this vision involves overcoming significant obstacles, as outlined in Google’s publications. The plan includes deploying Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) on satellites equipped with solar panels capable of generating energy nearly continuously. Google claims these space-based panels could be up to eight times more efficient than their Earth-bound counterparts.

A key challenge lies in ensuring robust communication among the satellites. To rival land-based data centers, satellite networks would need to support data transmissions of tens of terabits per second. Google proposes arranging satellites in closely-knit formations, potentially within kilometers of each other, to achieve this level of connectivity. Such proximity, however, introduces the risk of collisions, contributing to the already significant space debris issue.

On top of that, Google has to ensure that its TPUs can withstand higher levels of radiation in space. It has tested its Trillium TPUs for radiation tolerance and says they “survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures.”

It would be pretty pricey to send those TPUs into space at the moment. But a cost analysis the company performed suggests that launching and running a data center in space could become “roughly comparable” to the energy costs of an equivalent data center on Earth on a per-kilowatt/year basis by the mid-2030s. Google says it’s planning a joint mission with the company Planet to launch a couple prototype satellites by 2027 in order to test its hardware in orbit.