Synthetic intelligence (AI) is a foundational know-how that has the potential to reshape our world, driving new scientific discoveries and serving to us deal with humanity’s biggest challenges. We are actually fascinated with the place we are able to go to maximise that potential.
The solar is the final word supply of vitality within the photo voltaic system, emitting greater than 100 trillion occasions extra energy than humanity’s whole energy era. In the correct orbit, photo voltaic panels are as much as eight occasions extra productive than on the bottom and may generate energy almost constantly, decreasing the necessity for batteries. Sooner or later, house might be the right place to scale AI computing. Working backwards from that, our new analysis moonshot, Challenge Suncatcher, envisions a compact assortment of solar-powered satellites powered by Google TPUs and related by free-space optical hyperlinks. This strategy has nice potential for scale-up and has minimal affect on terrestrial assets.
We’re enthusiastic about this rising subject of exploration and the early analysis shared at the moment within the preprint paper “In direction of future space-based and extremely scalable AI infrastructure system design.” This paper describes our progress towards addressing the basic challenges of this bold effort, together with high-bandwidth communications between satellites, orbital dynamics, and the consequences of radiation on computing. By specializing in the modular design of interconnected small satellites, we’re laying the inspiration for future extremely scalable space-based AI infrastructure.
Challenge Suncatcher is a part of Google’s lengthy custom of moonshotting to deal with troublesome issues in science and engineering. As with all moonshots, there are unknowns, but it surely was on this spirit that we got down to construct large-scale quantum computer systems a decade in the past—earlier than it was thought-about a practical engineering aim—and it was on this spirit that we envisioned self-driving vehicles greater than 15 years in the past. That ultimately grew to become Waymo, which now travels for hundreds of thousands of passengers all over the world.
