Travis Beals spent two years trying to dismiss an idea that his Google colleague came up with: putting data centers in space, powered by the sun.
“It turned out, we couldn’t,” said Beals, senior director of Paradigms of Intelligence, a research team at Google that works on frontier artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.
The idea had more promise than he initially thought, and after doing numerous calculations and running ground testing, Beals and his team decided they needed to test it in space. Thus was born Project Suncatcher, a moonshot experiment by Google in partnership with earth imagining company Planet Labs, with the end goal of carrying out AI computing in Earth’s orbit.
The first satellite equipped with Tensor Processing Units, a specialized AI processor developed by Google, will be launched in 2027 to test whether the chips can survive the space environment and run computations effectively.
Google is not alone in trying to build massive data centers capable of training and deploying AI in space.
