Google's orbital AI data center will run for just 15 minutes at a time
Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
Google's Project Suncatcher takes its first step on October 1, launching a refrigerator-sized satellite carrying four of its custom TPU AI accelerators aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. The spacecraft, built by Planet Labs, draws only about one kilowatt from its solar panels, and its cooling system can run Gemini models in bursts of roughly 15 minutes before the chips must shut down and let the radiators catch up. Google will use the short mission to see how off-the-shelf TPUs handle radiation, launch vibration, and heat in orbit.
The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
- hn_submit
Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
- TwelveEyes
It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.
- spandrew
There were a lot of YouTube science-fluencers talking about how dumb this idea was. Google themselves called it a Moonshot (har har).
Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.
- eutropia
I am curious about the physical layout for moving the highly-concentrated heat in the GPUs out to the diffuse radiation panels required to keep them at operating temperature. Would it need something like a liquid cooling loop coupled with large radiators?
and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?
- logancbrown
Genuine question: why are there so many people up-in-arms on orbital data centers? Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct? There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.