Up to 100x. That's how much more Google's own energy chief, Amanda Peterson Corio, says data centers in space would cost compared to…
Up to 100x. That's how much more Google's own energy chief, Amanda Peterson Corio, says data centers in space would cost compared to data centers on Earth. And she said it right after Google celebrated running a model in orbit.
The prototype is Project Suncatcher, a satellite built with Planet and launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare on October 1. After commissioning, Google announced on October 30 that it had run an onboard Gemma 4 model on a data-center-class TPU and sent the output back to Earth, Google's "Hello World" moment.
But the satellite carries 4 TPUs and only about 1kW of solar power, so it can run just one chip at a time for roughly 15 to 20 minutes per session. A single 1GW AI campus on the ground is rated at about a million times that.
Even the project lead is measured about it. Travis Beals told NPR he doesn't expect orbital compute to get cheaper than terrestrial compute within the next five years.
The part I find most interesting is Corio's diagnosis of the problem on Earth: she points to permitting and grid-interconnection studies as the real constraints. If that's right, the space pitch starts to look like a very expensive way to route around zoning boards and interconnection queues. I'd love to know whether anyone at Google thinks fixing permitting would be cheaper than going to orbit.
$GOOGL
Source:
TechRadar: https://www.techradar.com/pro/just-a-moonshot-google-energy-head-claims-data-centers-in-space-would-cost-up-to-100x-more-than-on-earth
Not financial advice. For informational and educational purposes only.
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