Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.
… In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute. Working backwards from there, our new research moonshot, Project Suncatcher, envisions compact constellations of solar-powered satellites, carrying Google TPUs and connected by free-space optical links. This approach would have tremendous potential for scale, and also minimizes impact on terrestrial resources.
We’re excited about this growing area of exploration, and our early research, shared today in “Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design,” a preprint paper, which describes our progress toward tackling the foundational challenges of this ambitious endeavor — including high-bandwidth communication between satellites, orbital dynamics, and radiation effects on computing. By focusing on a modular design of smaller, interconnected satellites, we are laying the groundwork for a highly scalable, future space-based AI infrastructure. …
The proposed system consists of a constellation of networked satellites, likely operating in a dawn–dusk sun-synchronous low earth orbit, where they would be exposed to near-constant sunlight. This orbital choice maximizes solar energy collection and reduces the need for heavy onboard batteries. For this system to be viable, several technical hurdles must be overcome:
1. Achieving data center-scale inter-satellite links
re: that last point, they’re banking on price to LEO falling below $200/kg by the mid-2030s (so $15/kg would be an OOM more awesomeness still) because “at that price point, the cost of launching and operating a space-based data center could become roughly comparable to the reported energy costs of an equivalent terrestrial data center on a per-kilowatt/year basis” (more in their preprint).
Made me think of Google’s moonshot Project Suncatcher:
re: that last point, they’re banking on price to LEO falling below $200/kg by the mid-2030s (so $15/kg would be an OOM more awesomeness still) because “at that price point, the cost of launching and operating a space-based data center could become roughly comparable to the reported energy costs of an equivalent terrestrial data center on a per-kilowatt/year basis” (more in their preprint).