Google has some interesting plans for the future of AI. The company describes its Project Suncatcher as a “moonshot,” and for once, the term is appropriate.
Suncatcher envisions “equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.” The idea isn’t a new one, with one startup already investigating moon-based data centres.
Reach for the Suncatcher
Google has the funds to pull something like this off, however. The company reckons that Starlink-style constellations with Google TPUs, powered by sunlight and orbiting the planet, “would have tremendous potential for scale, and also [minimise] impact on terrestrial resources.” The company hasn’t started building an ad-powered Suncatcher rocket or anything, though. It’s more of a thought experiment at present.
The search giant has published a whitepaper on the idea (you can read that here), outlining how it thinks the whole process could work. Effective data transfer from space is one obstacle, something the project could overcome by flying its satellites in closer formations. The company would need to guide those satellites using ground-based infrastructure, and then there’s the question of radiation.
Suncatcher would expose Google’s AI hardware to high levels of radiation in space. That’s one thing the company can test here on the ground, so it’s already begun bombarding its Trillium v6e Cloud TPU with more radiation than it would be expected to receive during a five-year space mission. The results, says Google, are “promising”. As in, the hardware is “surprisingly radiation-hard for space applications.”
Finally, there’s the cost, but Google has money lying around. It expects the cost-per-kilo of sending stuff into space to drop to around $200/kg over the next decade, but it won’t wait around that long. It’ll launch two prototype AI satellites by mid-2027, in partnership with a company called Planet. Planet, unsurprisingly, also has its sights focused on space-borne artificial intelligence hardware.
Sending a technology that science fiction predicts may one day become sentient into space? What could possibly go wrong? Oh. Right. That.
