Google has launched a prototype satellite carrying its AI chips into orbit. Project Suncatcher is a long-term research effort to find out whether data centres for artificial intelligence could one day run in space, powered by near-constant sunlight.

Google has put its artificial intelligence chips into orbit. The prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher launched on October 1 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission, the company announced.

Google said its team had confirmed contact with the satellite and that it was operating as expected.

What Project Suncatcher Is

Google describes Suncatcher as a long-term research “moonshot” exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure, the computing that trains and runs AI models.

The attraction is energy. In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight and generate up to eight times more solar power than on Earth, according to Google.

The project was announced last year. The satellite was built in partnership with Planet, the Earth-imaging company.

What the Satellite Will Test

The mission is designed to answer a basic question: can the hardware survive?

Over the coming weeks, Google will gather data on how its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and temperature extremes of space.

“Some things can only be tested in space,” wrote Travis Beals, a senior director at Google.

Testing on the Ground

Google described the preparation in a post published on September 24.

  • Launch forces: a rocket trip to low Earth orbit lasts about 10 minutes, with sustained acceleration of up to 10 times the force of gravity. Individual components such as the chips can experience 50 to 100 times.
  • Vibration: the satellite was shaken on all three axes to mimic a launch. Google said the hardware held up.
  • Radiation: the chips were tested in a proton beam at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, while running AI workloads.

Google said initial results showed that its Trillium TPUs can survive a total radiation dose greater than they would receive during a five-year space mission.

The Longer-Term Idea

Eventually, Google says, it could be possible to link multiple constellations of satellites together so that they can manage larger AI workloads in orbit. Engineers are also working on how to cool hardware in a vacuum.

The company is careful about the timescale. It compares the work to its early research into autonomous driving and quantum computing, which took years of experiments before producing practical systems.

What Comes Next

Google says its next milestone is in 2027. A peer-reviewed paper setting out the research behind the mission has been published in the journal Joule.

Image: Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California (file photo, 2016). Photo by Asoundd via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.