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.
Taking "moonshot" nearly literally, though nobody has yet proposed datacenters on the moon that I've heard of.
This seems like it has a veritable mountain of challenges to climb:
- Power - solar power is more efficient in space, but the amount of panel surface area needed to run modern GPUs or TPUs is very, very high.
- Cooling - space is cold, but radiating heat without convection is much more difficult and also requires large surface area devoted to heat transfer.
- Costs and depreciation - all of this needs to be launched into orbit, and unlike a space station GPUs and TPUs today seem to have very short useful shelf lives
- Maintenance - suddenly becoming a onsite data center tech at Google may be a very highly sought-after career
I believe the engineers at Google are smart enough to know all of these things already, but this seems, generously, farfetched.
Others seem to be of the same opinion: Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea
I am a former NASA engineer/scientist with a PhD in space electronics. I also worked at Google for 10 years, in various parts of the company including YouTube and the bit of Cloud responsible for deploying AI capacity, so I'm quite well placed to have an opinion here. The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever.