It was in all probability at all times when, not if, Google would add its identify to the checklist of firms intrigued by the potential of orbiting information facilities.
Google introduced Tuesday a brand new initiative, named Challenge Suncatcher, to look at the feasibility of bringing synthetic intelligence to area. The thought is to deploy swarms of satellites in low-Earth orbit, every carrying Google's AI accelerator chips designed for coaching, content material technology, artificial speech and imaginative and prescient, and predictive modeling. Google calls these chips Tensor Processing Items, or TPUs.
“Challenge Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a brand new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite tv for pc constellations with TPUs and free-space optical hyperlinks to sooner or later scale machine studying compute in area,” Google wrote in a blog post.
“Like all moonshot, it's going to require us to resolve quite a lot of advanced engineering challenges,” Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, wrote on X. Pichai famous that Google's early checks present the corporate's TPUs can face up to the extreme radiation they may encounter in area. “Nevertheless, important challenges nonetheless stay like thermal administration and on-orbit system reliability.”
The why and the way
Ars reported on Google's announcement Tuesday, and Google revealed a research paper outlining the motivation for such a moonshot challenge. One of many authors, Travis Beals, spoke with Ars about Challenge Suncatcher and provided his ideas on why it simply may work.
“We're simply seeing a lot demand from folks for AI,” mentioned Beals, senior director of Paradigms of Intelligence, a analysis crew inside Google. “So, we needed to determine an answer for compute that would work irrespective of how massive demand may develop.”
Larger demand will result in larger information facilities consuming colossal quantities of electrical energy. In line with the MIT Technology Review, AI alone might eat as a lot electrical energy yearly as 22 p.c of all US households by 2028. Cooling can also be an issue, typically requiring entry to huge water sources, elevating vital questions on environmental sustainability.
