Space X and Tesla boss Elon Musk has made a futuristic prediction about compute claiming that most of it will move into outer space. The prediction came as Google announced Project Suncatcher its ‘moonshot’ to put AI in space.
Sharing a video featuring Google’s Senior Director, Paradigms of Intelligence Travis Beals, Musk said, “The amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute.”
Earlier in a post on X dated September 13, Musk said, “I am highly confident that SpaceX will be launching Nvidia VR NLV72 AI computers in space next year.”
This is part of SpaceX’s Starmind concept, which aims to establish AI data centres in orbit. According to SpaceX, Orbital satellite with localized compute that takes advantage of readily available power and cooling in space and beams back data via high-bandwidth lasers to the Starlink constellation.
Meanwhile, Google on Thursday (local time) announced that Project Suncatcher is scheduled to embark on its first test in orbit, launching a prototype satellite to evaluate how Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) perform in space. The launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for October 1.
According to Google, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure. In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth. Eventually, it could be possible to link together multiple constellations of satellites, allowing them to manage larger AI workloads while in orbit.
Speaking in the video shared by Musk, Google’s Senior Director, Paradigms of Intelligence Travis Beals said,” This idea, that’s crazy, there must be a reason it won’t work. And so the first thing we tried to do is to find that reason. It turns out that it is possible. At the heart of it, Project Suncatcher is a simple idea. How can we efficiently scale AI infrastructure through orbital data centres by leveraging the abundant energy that we can get from the sun?
“When we first thought about this idea, we had looked at a variety of orbits, even geosynchronous orbit. But the dawn-dusk orbit is really optimal for what we’re wanting to do, because the solar panels in that orbit will get almost 24/7 sun. At its smallest level, you’ll have an individual satellite that will have dozens of TPU chips. And then, to scale to solve larger problems, we’ll have many such satellites linked together and flying in clusters…The sun is the ultimate energy source in our solar system. Once you start looking at solar power and think, “How can I scale that? How can I make that as simple and efficient as possible?”, doing it in space, in the right orbit, becomes the natural answer,” Beals added.
Google says, exploring space as a viable location for scalable AI compute won’t happen all at once and the first launch is about seeing what works, identifying points of failure, and applying those findings to future missions.
-ANI
