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fromTheregister
2 weeks agoOrbital datacenter startup admits launch economics don't fly
Orbital plans a 10,000-satellite neocloud, contingent on reduced launch costs and increased capacity from companies like SpaceX.
Could IT infrastructure, and even the rise of AI, eventually migrate beyond the atmosphere? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in October that gigawatt-scale, solar-powered data centers would be a reality within 10 to 20 years. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Elon Musk was even more ambitious: AI data centers in the "final frontier" could be viable within two to three years. Google also plans to deploy its TPU chips in orbit via Project Suncatcher.
Google on Tuesday announced a new moonshot - launching constellations of solar-powered satellites packed to the gills with its home-grown tensor processing units (TPUs) to form orbital AI datacenters. "In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute," Google executives wrote in a blog post, in which they explain that solar panels can be eight times more efficient in space than on Earth, and can produce power continuously.