Google has dreamed up a possible new approach to get round useful resource constraints for energy-hungry AI information facilities on Earth — launching its AI chips into area on solar-powered satellites. It’s a ‘moonshot’ analysis challenge Google introduced in the present day referred to as Venture Suncatcher.
If it could possibly ever get off the bottom, the challenge would primarily create space-based information facilities. Google hopes that by doing so, it could possibly harness solar energy around-the-clock. The dream is harnessing a near-unlimited supply of fresh power which may permit the corporate to chase its AI ambitions with out the considerations its information facilities on Earth have raised in the case of driving up energy plant emissions and utility payments via hovering electrical energy demand.
“Sooner or later, area could also be the perfect place to scale AI compute,” Travis Beals, a Google senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence, writes in a weblog put up in the present day. The corporate additionally printed a preprint paper, which has not undergone educational peer evaluation, detailing its progress to date on this endeavor.
“Sooner or later, area could also be the perfect place to scale AI compute.”
There are main hurdles Google would wish to beat to show this plan into actuality, which it explains within the weblog and paper. Google envisions its Tensor Processing Items (TPUs) orbiting Earth on satellites outfitted with photo voltaic panels that would generate electrical energy virtually repeatedly, making them eight instances extra productive than comparable panels on Earth, in response to Google.
A significant problem can be to make sure that the satellites can talk properly with one another. Competing with information facilities on land “requires hyperlinks between satellites that help tens of terabits per second,” Google writes. Maneuvering constellations of satellites into tight formations may help them obtain that, maybe flying satellites inside “kilometers or much less” of one another. That’s a lot nearer than satellites function in the present day, and already area junk from collisions is a rising threat.
On high of that, Google has to make sure that its TPUs can face up to larger ranges of radiation in area. 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 could be fairly dear to ship these TPUs into area in the mean time. However a price evaluation the corporate carried out means that launching and working an information heart in area may grow to be “roughly comparable” to the power prices of an equal information heart 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 in an effort to check its {hardware} in orbit.
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