In the age of artificial intelligence, every tech company is competing to mark its dominance not only in terrestrial but also in extra-terrestrial space.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pitched the visionary and bold idea of building next-generation orbital AI-powered data centers in space.
Under an ambitious project known as “Project Suncatcher”, Pichai is planning to introduce prototype satellite racks with Google’s Trillium AI chips as early as 2027.
These orbital data centers would harness space’s abundant solar energy which is 100 trillion times more than ground sources. The utilization of space’s solar energy will be helpful in fulfilling AI’s growing demands without straining Earth’s power grids.
While interviewing with Fox News, Pichai said that Google is currently working on quantum computing, adding “in that spirit, one of our moonshots is to, how do we one day have data centers in space, so that we can better harness the solar energy.”
“We want to put these data centers in space closer to the sun and we are taking our first step in 2027 and will send tiny racks of machines, have tested them out, and start scaling from there,” Google CEO added.
The moonshot concept has drawn a reaction from the SpaceX owner Elon Musk. Taking to X, Tesla CEO posted the video of Sundar Pichai’s interview with the caption “Interesting.”
Pichai also predicted that such data centers in extraterrestrial space could become a routine over the next decade, aiming to scale machine learning with high energy-efficiency and evade resource constraints on Earth.
