Google has dreamed up a possible new method to get round useful resource constraints for energy-hungry AI knowledge facilities on Earth — launching its AI chips into area on solar-powered satellites. It’s a ‘moonshot’ analysis venture Google introduced immediately referred to as Undertaking Suncatcher.
If it may possibly ever get off the bottom, the venture would primarily create space-based knowledge facilities. Google hopes that by doing so, it may possibly harness solar energy around-the-clock. The dream is harnessing a near-unlimited supply of fresh vitality that may permit the corporate to chase its AI ambitions with out the considerations its knowledge facilities on Earth have raised relating to driving up energy plant emissions and utility payments by means of hovering electrical energy demand.
“Sooner or later, area could also be the most effective place to scale AI compute,” Travis Beals, a Google senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence, writes in a weblog put up immediately. The corporate additionally printed a preprint paper, which has not undergone educational peer overview, detailing its progress thus far on this endeavor.
“Sooner or later, area could also be the most effective place to scale AI compute.”
There are main hurdles Google would want to beat to show this plan into actuality, which it explains within the weblog and paper. Google envisions its Tensor Processing Models (TPUs) orbiting Earth on satellites outfitted with photo voltaic panels that would generate electrical energy virtually constantly, making them eight instances extra productive than comparable panels on Earth, in line with Google.
A significant problem can be to make sure that the satellites can talk nicely with one another. Competing with knowledge facilities on land “requires hyperlinks between satellites that help tens of terabits per second,” Google writes. Maneuvering constellations of satellites into tight formations can assist them obtain that, maybe flying satellites inside “kilometers or much less” of one another. That’s a lot nearer than satellites function immediately, and already area junk from collisions is a rising threat.
On prime of that, Google has to make sure that its TPUs can face up to increased ranges of radiation in area. It has examined its Trillium TPUs for radiation tolerance and says they “survive a complete ionizing dose equal to a 5 yr mission life with out everlasting failures.”
It could be fairly expensive to ship these TPUs into area in the mean time. However a value evaluation the corporate carried out means that launching and working a knowledge heart in area may change into “roughly comparable” to the vitality prices of an equal knowledge heart on Earth on a per-kilowatt/yr foundation by the mid-2030s. Google says it’s planning a joint mission with the corporate Planet to launch a pair prototype satellites by 2027 in an effort to take a look at its {hardware} in orbit.
