Google just answered a question that sounded like science fiction a year ago. Can an AI chip survive getting launched into space, cooked by radiation, and left to swing through brutal temperature changes, and still work when you need it to.
On October 1, a fridge sized satellite called MVP lifted off from Vandenberg on a SpaceX Falcon 9, riding alongside a bunch of other payloads on the Transporter-18 mission. Built with the satellite company Planet, it carries four of Google’s Trillium TPU chips, the same family that powers a chunk of its AI work back on Earth. Google confirmed it made contact with the satellite once it reached orbit.
Nobody at Google is trying to run a data center in orbit tomorrow. This satellite is the first real test of something called Project Suncatcher, a long shot bet that space, not a warehouse in Iowa, might be where AI computing eventually lives. The pitch is simple once you hear it. Solar panels in orbit pull in about eight times more power than the same panels stuck on the ground, and there is no neighbor complaining about the noise or the water use.
Before any of that becomes real, Google needs to know the chips do not fry, crack, or scramble their memory up there. That is literally what this satellite exists to find out, nothing more dramatic than that.
If this keeps working, Google plans to put up two more satellites by 2027 to test how they talk to each other with lasers. That is the unglamorous, slow version of the AI space race, and I think it is the more honest one. Everyone talks about smarter models. Fewer people ask where all that computing power is actually going to live once the ground runs out of room and power for it.
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Sources:
https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/
https://www.networkworld.com/article/4227183/googles-first-prototype-satellite-is-going-up-kicking-off-its-space-based-data-center-project.html
https://www.techradar.com/pro/googles-next-moonshot-wants-to-shoot-ai-data-centers-into-space-orbiting-suncatcher-facilities-will-be-equipped-with-ai-tpus
Repost this. Thanks.