Google has dreamed up a possible new technique to get round useful resource constraints for energy-hungry AI knowledge facilities on Earth — launching its AI chips into house on solar-powered satellites. It’s a ‘moonshot’ analysis challenge Google introduced as we speak referred to as Undertaking Suncatcher.
If it might probably ever get off the bottom, the challenge would primarily create space-based knowledge facilities. Google hopes that by doing so, it might probably harness solar energy around-the-clock. The dream is harnessing a near-unlimited supply of unpolluted power 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 power plant emissions and utility bills via soaring electricity demand.
“Sooner or later, house could also be the perfect place to scale AI compute,” Travis Beals, a Google senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence, writes in a blog post as we speak. The corporate additionally revealed a preprint paper, which has not undergone educational peer evaluate, detailing its progress thus far on this endeavor.
“Sooner or later, house could also be the perfect 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 Units (TPUs) orbiting Earth on satellites outfitted with photo voltaic panels that would generate electrical energy virtually repeatedly, making them eight occasions extra productive than related panels on Earth, based on Google.
A serious problem might be to make sure that the satellites can talk effectively with one another. Competing with knowledge facilities on land “requires hyperlinks between satellites that assist tens of terabits per second,” Google writes. Maneuvering constellations of satellites into tight formations will help them obtain that, maybe flying satellites inside “kilometers or much less” of one another. That’s a lot nearer than satellites function as we speak, and already space junk from collisions is a growing risk.
On high of that, Google has to make sure that its TPUs can face up to larger ranges of radiation in house. 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 might be fairly expensive to ship these TPUs into house in the mean time. However a value evaluation the corporate carried out means that launching and working a knowledge middle in house might change into “roughly comparable” to the power prices of an equal knowledge middle 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 to be able to take a look at its {hardware} in orbit.
