AI data center in space The race for data centers is heating up. No doubt that those massive costly and energy-hungry centers are not welcome in all countries. However, there is no turning back now. Whether we like it or not, those data centers will be a reality of life. It is on this background that the idea of putting those into space seems to be the best way forward. We have looked at this before. Just the magnitude of hardware to be placed in orbit is massive. Then comes all the ‘extra’: maintaining it, repairing it, upgrading it and a lot more. I found an interesting article here. It really looks at who is actually doing something, not just talking about it. I quote freely from the article. Google is testing the waters on this. It is not even clear if it will make economical sense. “It’s not the first time AI chips have been tested in space. But Google’s experimental satellite is designed to figure out specifically how the company’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, perform after undergoing the jarring forces associated with launching to orbit atop a rocket and being battered by the radiation-riddled environment of space.
“This first launch is about seeing what works, identifying points of failure, and applying those findings to future missions,” Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of paradigms of intelligence, said in a news release. Is Elon also there? Yes “A similar idea partly fueled SpaceX’s record-shattering IPO earlier this year”. Radiation is only part of the battle. In-space data centers will also have to contend with the question of how to dissipate heat. On Earth, that process is simple — but also a strain on local resources — as data centers make use of the simple physics of convection. Cooling towers can disperse heat by evaporating water. That solution is not viable in the vacuum of space, where there are no air molecules to aid the process. So, data-processing satellites built to house AI computing will likely need massive radiators to expel heat away from their inner processing chips. Maybe it is an idea to look at either the moon or Mars for data centers? having 200 people or more zipping arund in space looks not feasible.
Putting AI computing chips in space, for example, makes it more difficult to upgrade hardware when better technology becomes available: AI chips “advance every 1–2 years, while satellites last 5–7 years, making hardware obsolescence a persistent challenge,” market analytics firm JLL Research explained in a June report. The only way that orbital data centers become more attractive than terrestrial ones, the report concludes, is if the price of getting new satellites into space drops dramatically. And the scale of orbital data centers could be massive: SpaceX said it plans to deploy a constellation of up to 1 million AI-computing satellites. Google has not said how large it may seek to grow a Project Suncatcher constellation, but a 2025 paper suggested the company proposed operating the technology in “clusters” of 81 satellites. It’s not yet clear how many clusters Google would need to deploy for a fully operational system, the spokesperson said. Space-based data centers are not just around the corner. This is technology that still needs to be developed.
Let us just look at a few elements that even I can see: The actual chip-board is designed for ‘normal’ earth operation. A flat board where elements (CPU, etc) are mounted. And a heat sink. Does that work in space? Do we see the traditional racks and the traditional rows of CPU ‘towers’? If that is the case, we will also see those are connected with cables and connectors. And those can fail. That is why there is ‘staff’ to look after it. Google AI says: “An operational AI data center typically requires 15 to 300 permanent on-site staff members, depending on the size and power capacity of the facility. Despite their massive physical footprints and multi-billion dollar costs, modern data centers are highly automated and run on surprisingly lean teams. Do we now say that because those centers are in space, they do not need staff to maintain it? That sounds weird if the base technology is the same as earth-technology. So if each data center should require 100 staff members, those will be 20 times more manpower intensive than the ISS. Is this even possible to do in the shorter timeframe? And what about hi-speed comms back to earth? cabling is not really an option?