The tech industry is on a tear, building data centers for AI as quickly as they can buy up the land. The sky-high energy costs and logistical headaches of managing all those data centers have prompted interest in space-based infrastructure . Moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have mused about putting GPUs in space , and now Google confirms it’s working on its own version of the technology. The company’s latest “moonshot” is known as Project Suncatcher , and if all goes as planned, Google hopes it will lead to scalable networks of orbiting TPUs.

The space around Earth has changed a lot in the last few years. A new generation of satellite constellations like Starlink has shown it’s feasible to relay Internet communication via orbital systems. Deploying high-performance AI accelerators in space along similar lines would be a boon to the industry’s never-ending build-out. Google notes that space may be “the best place to scale AI compute.”

Google’s vision for scalable orbiting data centers relies on solar-powered satellites with free-space optical links connecting the nodes into a distributed network. Naturally, there are numerous engineering challenges to solve before Project Suncatcher is real. As a reference, Google points to the long road from its first moonshot self-driving cars 15 years ago to the Waymo vehicles that are almost fully autonomous today.

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