Chips in low-Earth orbit
Google's first AI chips are now in orbit. On October 1, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted an experimental satellite carrying four Trillium TPUs, the same processors used to run the Gemini models, into low-Earth orbit. Google has confirmed contact with the craft and says it is operating as expected.
The satellite is part of Project Suncatcher, the company's effort to test whether AI computing can work in space. It was built with Planet Labs, measures roughly the size of a refrigerator, and is designed to last about a year.
How the hardware survives
Space is a hard place for computers. There is no air, so fans cannot cool the chips. Heat travels through copper and aluminium pipes to radiators that release it into space as infrared light. The satellite runs Gemini in bursts of about 15 minutes, then shuts down to cool.
Engineers tested the chips before launch. They were subjected to forces of 50 to 100 times Earth's gravity, and researchers fired proton beams at them at a university laboratory to mimic radiation. The chips had no hard failures, and the memory withstood more than twice the dose expected over five years before errors appeared. The main risk in orbit is cosmic rays flipping bits in the middle of a calculation.
Why space looks attractive
In the right orbit a solar panel can produce several times the energy it would generate on the ground, because there is no night, cloud or weather. Google plans to launch two more experimental satellites in 2027 to test laser links between them. A laboratory demonstration has already reached 800 gigabits per second. Longer term, the company has described clusters of about 81 satellites flying within a kilometre of each other.
The economics are still unproven. One estimate calculates that a one-gigawatt orbital cluster would need around 10,000 satellites and cost about $30 billion to build and launch at today's prices. Data centres on Earth remain far cheaper. Google is betting that falling launch costs will close the gap. SpaceX, meanwhile, showed its own vision of orbital computing at a conference this month, describing plans for a much larger fleet of satellites.
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