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 Google's Gemini AI from space. Elon Musk's SpaceX is also working on space data centers, and has said it expects to start deploying "orbital AI compute satellites" as early as 2028.
Google, in partnership with the aerospace and satellite imagery company Planet, envisions clusters of satellites eventually orbiting together to form space-based data centers. Each satellite will carry dozens of TPU chips and communicate with the others — and Earth — via lasers. Next year, the company plans to put two more satellites into orbit to test their connection.
The satellite launched today is a prototype that Beals called "a very minimal test" to make sure the chips can run in space. A SpaceX rocket carried it into orbit, and Planet will get it up and running. Beal said Google will then fire up and test the TPUs. The goal is for the mission to be operational for a year.
Brandon Lucia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said the idea sounds "very sci-fi," but much of the technology has been proven at a research level.
Still, there are huge challenges. Heat is a big one. Computer chips get hot, and on Earth the heat can be dissipated with wind or water. That's not possible in the vacuum of space.
"In a satellite in particular, using more power to do the computations means dumping more heat into the confined environment inside of the satellite," Lucia said.
In its blog post, Google called cooling the chips "a crucial research challenge," and outlined some of the approaches it's working on, including using a combination of pipes and radiators to wick heat away from the chips.
Beal said the radiators are one of the heaviest components on the current mission — a drawback because heavier objects are more expensive to launch — and his team is working on ways to cool chips more efficiently.
Lucia points out that there are also major questions about upkeep. When a chip malfunctions in a terrestrial data center, or something goes on the fritz, a technician can walk in and fix it. That's harder when the data center is circling hundreds of miles above Earth.
"Those all have their cost and complexity amplified by a factor of 10, maybe a factor of 100. And so there has to be a big payoff," Lucia said.
And there are environmental questions, too. While space data centers would run on solar power, the rockets that launch them run off of carbon-based fuels. And eventually they will re-enter earth's atmosphere, potentially adding pollution as they burn up.
Elon Musk has said that space is the "only way to scale" data centers to meet future demand for AI. But the economics are still a question mark. Launches are costly, repairs are difficult, and communication by laser across hundreds of miles and through Earth's atmosphere is slower. And it will take constellations of many satellites to equal the computing capacity of a terrestrial data center.
Beals said he and his small team think about these questions a lot. "It doesn't help a lot if this is technically possible, if it's always going to be too expensive to be practical," he said.
He added that it is difficult to know when space-based data centers will be economically viable. "I don't see this being something where it's cheaper to do this in the next five years. I think it will take longer than that," he said.
And he doesn't think that space data centers will replace terrestrial data centers any time soon. "I think that there are going to be use cases that make more sense to do on Earth and use cases that make more sense to do in space," Beals said. "In the really-long run, perhaps the set of things you do in space gets larger and larger until that's where most of the compute is happening. But I think for a long time you'll have both coexisting."
The whole project, he said, is a "moonshot."
"It's going to take a long time," he said. "It's not going to be a completely straightforward journey."
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