Google to test building AI data centres in space

“Our TPUs are headed to space,” wrote Sudar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent, while launching Project Suncatcher—an experiment to run artificial intelligence data centres in space.

Google is launching two solar-powered satellites early 2027, each carrying four tensor processing units (TPUs)—the company’s proprietary AI chips which could run AI model training using power directly from the Sun.

The project is part of Google’s Moonshot philosophy, a radical idea which pushes the boundaries of space and engineering and…