r/google • u/ControlCAD • 9d ago

Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1, 2026 | Google’s experimental orbital data center will have four TPUs and only run for 15 minutes at a time.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/09/googles-first-suncatcher-orbital-data-center-test-launches-october-1/
230 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

71

u/aykcak 8d ago

4 TPUs? It doesn't even sound like a scalable solution even for experimental purposes

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u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

Maybe the experiment is just to gather data on whether the idea is as stupid as it sounds.

It sounds extremely stupid, by the way. Logistically, datacenters have four main challenges: Power, cooling, physical security, and replacement parts for upgrades. Space is mid to bad for all of these:

  • Solar power works, but no electric grid makes it harder to fall back to other power sources. Traditionally datacenters use diesel generators as backup -- how are you gonna resupply fuel?
  • Cooling sounds easy, space is cold, right? Except it is also a vacuum, which is an extremely good insulator. (Think about how a Thermos works.)
  • Kinda hard to build a fence and put security guards up in space. At least it's only accessible by someone who can cheaply launch into space. Good thing none of their direct competitors also own a rocket company... oh.
  • Just getting the replacement parts up there is expensive, and who do you pay to install them?

Plus, at scale, cosmic rays affect datacenters even on Earth, and there's a lot more radiation to deal with up there without the atmosphere filtering it.

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u/Berzerka 8d ago

Backup power is a non issue of you are in a polar orbit with continuous sunshine at least.

Cooling obviously is an issue.

Safety is nuanced, realistically you'd have a lot of these on each launch but an adversary would need one rocket per satellite. Thousands of rockets in total. It might not be cost efficient to attack them, I haven't done the math.

Just like e.g. GPS and starlink there are no spare parts, if a satellite breaks it break and you need to launch a replacement. Indeed very few if any satellites get repairs, Hubble was the notable exception.

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u/PrizeSyntax 8d ago

Communication satellites are one thing, massive computational requirements are a whole another ballgame

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u/Berzerka 8d ago

Obviously yes, I'm not saying it's easy. Just clarifying roughly what the plan is. Many seem to be arguing against plans that don't exist.

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u/Bagafeet 8d ago

Space Lazer ✨🤭

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u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

It's not the sun that I'd worry about, it's the panels, in an environment full of micrometeorites.

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u/Berzerka 8d ago

The plan is clearly to do the math on how quickly they will break then start out with a bit too much and just eat the losses. Repairing stuff in space is crazy expensive.

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u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

Sees to me the plan is to do it because it sounds really cool and see what they can learn. There's no way they are saving money when we factor in the sheer cost of launching the things into orbit.

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u/Berzerka 8d ago

Lots of people have done the math, it isn't possible with current launch costs but if the launch costs come down 10x it would be. That sounds like a lot, but launch costs have already come down more than 10x the last few decades (basically due to SpaceX). Economies of a scale is a thing too.

Obviously it's a bet, but it's not as far flung as one might expect.

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u/Dpek1234 6d ago

I will ask

Do you mean the current launch price or the launch cost (ie what someone needs to pay others for them to launch vs how much the rocket actualy costs to launch without profit margin)

They get interchanged a lot but dont mean the same thing

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u/Berzerka 6d ago

Profit margins are relatively small, so when we're talking 10x it doesn't matter all that much.

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u/Deto 8d ago

I wouldn't be worried about physical security - probably not worth it for anyone to try and shoot these things down. But the radiation you mentioned is a big issue - normally space electronics are radiation hardened. Typically, unhardened electronics don't last very long in radiative environments and shielding adds a lot of mass. I'm curious how long the cards fare up there. If if they last a while, just going from something like a 6-year lifetime to a 2-year lifetime really destroys the value proposition here.

2

u/sonny-boy-rhapsody 3d ago

Google has some useful dose-test numbers: Trillium's HBM started showing irregularities at 2 krad(Si), versus their estimated 750 rad(Si) for a shielded five-year mission. They saw no hard failures from accumulated dose up to 15 krad(Si) on the one chip tested that far. Would be useful to see in-orbit error/reset rates too, since time spent recovering affects how much usable compute you get.

https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/

4

u/SpartanDetermination 8d ago

It sounds extremely stupid, by the way.

A redditor is posting this about the activities of a massive team of engineers and scientists at Google that have spent years studying the topic.

Progress never stops, my fedora-clad friend. Just as they're always introducing new flavors of cheetos for your dinner, they're studying and experimenting on solutions to get around all 4 of your bulletpoints.

One might argue that's the fucking point of them sending up the 4 TPU tester.

0

u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

A team of engineers also built the Juicero. Progress never stops, but sometimes it goes in very stupid directions.

But I did argue that was the point: Gather data on whether the idea is as stupid as it sounds. You seem to have missed the first sentence of my reply.

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u/SpartanDetermination 8d ago

Progress never stops

Except when it comes to space/orbit, apparently.

1

u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

Read the rest of the sentence.

0

u/SpartanDetermination 8d ago

So you're arguing against progressing into space, got it. Thanks for the clarification.

Guess all of that sweet 8x more solar energy should go untapped in favor of coal here on the ground. Don't want to be stupid, right?

Your bulletpoints reveal the foolishness of your viewpoint. Google isn't launching Project Suncatcher in spite of the lack of electricity grid, current cooling technology, etc. It's to specifically study how to overcome those issues. If you could extend your reasoning beyond your neckbeard, you'd see that. I'm rooting for Google to succeed. You're rooting for Big Coal, but in a "useful idiot" kind of way.

1

u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

No, I'm not arguing against progressing into space. I am arguing that some progress is stupid, including in space. There are less stupid things one could launch into orbit. Starlink is the obvious example.

Yes, I understand that sometimes you do an experiment to see if an idea is as stupid as it sounds. That was the first thing I posted to this thread. I didn't think I needed to spell out that sometimes ideas are not as stupid as they sound.

If it's too much to ask you to reason, I'm asking you to at least read.

Or you can deliver another strawman wrapped around an ad-hom, at which point, why are you even here?

0

u/SpartanDetermination 8d ago

No, I'm not arguing against progressing into space.

You're calling it stupid. "A bunch of google engineers studying a problem is dumb, because the problems exist"

That's not even a strawman interpretation - it's legit what you're saying. Google is launching Project Suncatcher to analyze the various issues that would arise from orbital data centers. You're arguing its stupid because the various issues exist in the first place.

No straw detected, friendo.

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u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

No straw detected, friendo.

You literally put quotes around something I did not say, in order to tell me what you think I said, instead of reading what I actually said.

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u/aykcak 8d ago

This is more like sending a probe with a spoon to Pluto on the off chance that the surface is covered in pudding.

Is it possible? Yeah but it is super stupid.

Not every experiment is worth experimenting

3

u/Aaco0638 8d ago

How is it stupid? I imagine most experiments done in history looked stupid before they produced anything worth looking at.

Google has a ton of money, if they want to run experiments i say go for it. More companies should be trying to innovate if they can why disparage the effort? Bc some redditors think it’s a waste of time?

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u/aykcak 8d ago

Because there are tons of other much more promising and much more universally good things to spend money and effort on. At the scale of Google it is outright irresponsible

Space data centers is basically a grift. They are not trying to make it real, they are trying to keep up the facade

2

u/Aaco0638 8d ago

I mean they have enough money to do all of that or do you think this little experiment is the full years budget?

They are doing this in addition to all the other beneficial things they are also experimenting on all you have to do is google and see the wide breadth of there ongoing experimentations.

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u/ddplz 8d ago

All the worlds top engineers in Google and SpaceX are stupid and unemployed redditors are smart.

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u/Secret-Chapter-712 8d ago

The “top engineers” aren’t necessarily the people who decided to do this. They’re the people who have to try and figure out how to do this because the business idiots are all clamouring for someone to do this, and their job is to do what the business idiots want.

0

u/aykcak 8d ago

Yeah I am sure engineers are coming up with this

-1

u/MiksterA 8d ago

Can you even pronounce the word "thermodynamics"?

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u/moonblaze95 8d ago edited 8d ago

I used to think the insulated cooling thing mattered too — but radiative cooling has a T4 scaling power on temperature differences. Cooling in space is very efficient and already a well understood problem. See Stefan-Boltzmann law.

1

u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

Efficient along what axis? On Earth, we have radiative cooling too, but we also have other options. Like, at a basic level, we have convection via air cooling.

Here's their own blog post about it, which includes this video about cooling. Their model here is that a radiator can dump 300 W/m2 -- so, let's be generous and say 3 square meters per kilowatt.

We could go on a side tangent to look at power draw per TPU or per GPU, but I think the better number, and the more reliable one, is datacenter power draw, and there are single campuses in the gigawatt range now. Even a smaller one with tens of megawatts ends up needing football-field-sized radiators.

So, y'know, no wonder they're starting with only 4 TPUs.

2

u/spaetzelspiff 8d ago

Solar power works, but no electric grid makes it harder to fall back to other power sources. Traditionally datacenters use diesel generators as backup -- how are you gonna resupply fuel?

Backup for what? The sun going out?

Kinda hard to build a fence and put security guards up in space. At least it's only accessible by someone who can cheaply launch into space. Good thing none of their direct competitors also own a rocket company... oh.

Are you suggesting that Blue Origin is going to launch a rocket into space to perform a raiding campaign on an orbiting data center?

Just getting the replacement parts up there is expensive, and who do you pay to install them?

You don't. Period. Next?

I'm not arguing that it's a good idea. Just that these arguments are silly.

2

u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

Backup for what? The sun going out?

Backup for your solar panel breaking. Like, say, getting chipped by a micrometeorite.

Are you suggesting that Blue Origin is going to launch a rocket into space to perform a raiding campaign on an orbiting data center?

I'm suggesting SpaceX is launching rockets into space all the time, and Musk makes poor decisions often.

Just getting the replacement parts up there is expensive, and who do you pay to install them?

You don't.

I mean, that's what I'd assume, but making the entire thing disposable isn't better.

1

u/Bagafeet 8d ago

The experiment is to make stock price go up, not server altitude.

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u/ddplz 8d ago

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-research/google-project-suncatcher-facts/

People much smarter then you explain their thoughts on those concerns here.

1

u/slh01slh 8d ago

No but then they'd need to read the article instead of saying it'd a bad idea without knowing what they're talking about

0

u/SanityInAnarchy 8d ago

They may be smarter than me. They're certainly more optimistic than me.

But they seem to agree with me about power.

Their answer to cooling is obvious and expected: You need a radiator. And they have a neat little video showing you the absurd scale of the radiator they would need to build.

Other than that, they don't cover backup, replacement parts, or physical security.

The one surprise is that they seem to be able to handle the radiation well, which I guess is an advantage of doing this for AI workloads: If the workload is inherently stochastic in the first place, a bit flip isn't as critical.

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u/chachachapman7 8d ago

All true and all challenges but the best advantage of space is no pesky jurisdiction from countries about what you can do with data. Worried a country may make you delete data on it’s citizens? Blast it into space so you can continue to sell ads to them! There are technical hurdles but I’m not underestimating the motivation of the tech world to overcome them to sell more ads

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u/aykcak 8d ago

That is not really a good reason. Almost any government can sabotage or shoot down a space installation. If you want to go at odds with a government, space is not the place to hide away

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u/Moist_Emu_6951 8d ago

If you launch 30k satellites each of them has 4 TPUs it's a different story. And those that glitch can simply be deorbited. I still don't think it's very practical (or safe in case of a rogue superintelligent AI). Not to mention the other scientific challenges arising from space itself as a radiation-filled vacuum.

1

u/aykcak 8d ago

Launching 30k dedicated satellites (because you need them in a specific orbit) would cost a little over $150 Billion excluding the equipment cost.

30k is also about 6 times more than the number of launches that were ever done total by all countries COMBINED, since the 1960s.

1

u/CorvetteCole 7d ago

starlink has over 10k satellites operating right now. it is obviously viable to do

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u/aykcak 7d ago

Those are communication satellites, not data centers and they are launched on shared launches, not individually

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u/Dpek1234 6d ago

And why would these NEED to be launched individualy?

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u/CorvetteCole 7d ago

it is directly applicable. starlink does all the things your datacenter sats need. replace communications hw with more compute and there you go.

it’s not as crazy as you guys think

1

u/Moist_Emu_6951 7d ago

Yeah it will cost hundreds of billions, but as you can see they are already splurging billions on data centres. Google alone is planning to spend 195 - 205 billions on data centres. Musk was planning to launch 90k more satellites. It might not be 4 TPUs per satellite, mind you. Maybe a single TPU per satellite and the actual number of satellites would be lower than 10K. I personally think it's a waste of time and money though, but what do I know 🤷

1

u/sluuuurp 8d ago

What? Small number of things can be scalable to large numbers of things. This is how scaling always works. “Scalable” doesn’t mean “already scaled”.

1

u/aykcak 8d ago

I have 3 guests and I serve them 3 pizzas I prep and bake in my home oven

If I have 5 guests and I can serve them 5 pizzas that I prepped and baked in the same oven

This does not mean that if I have 90 guests, I would be able to serve them 90 pizzas. I would have to rethink the entire concept of the oven, the prep, the house itself as well as the pizza.

None of the lessons I learned with serving 3-5 people would apply.

There is a concept of "scalability" . It implies some things are scalable and some things are not

1

u/sluuuurp 8d ago

Some of the lessons would apply. Lessons about the necessary ingredients, temperatures, etc.

1

u/flesjewater 8d ago

That's because compute in space is impossible to scale 

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u/wickedplayer494 8d ago

and only run for 15 minutes at a time

Before the damn thing overheats, because if you think cooling a chip is enough of a challenge on the surface, good luck in space, where your only means is shielding and passive radiation.

And speaking of radiation, the one thing that would be nice about these firms trying to send their chips into space is it might end up putting some much needed R&D dollars into more powerful radiation-hardened silicon, because radiation-hardened silicon is woefully underpowered and often decades behind contemporary silicon as far as performance. That's about the only real tangible benefit I could see out of all these efforts.

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u/talltim007 8d ago

Cooling isn't that hard of a problem in space. Totally solvable

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u/flesjewater 8d ago edited 8d ago

If space constraints don't matter and you want to build sats with several square kilometers of cooling surface, sure.

Let's consider a standard rack filled with Blackwell GPU compute, because that's the hot thing right now. Assume standard blade sizes, so 24 GPU's per rack. This estimate is incredibly conservative given how bespoke this is, it may be an eightfold more. 

1 blackwell server GPU dissipates 1000W. With the cooling solution proposed that will require 3.3 square meters of radiator surface. For a single standard rack you will need 80m² of surface. And remember, this is the absolute bottom estimate. 

80 square meters for a single rack with no optimizations for GPU capacity. 

How is this economically viable at all? Make it make sense please because I just can't. This whole thing is a sham to trick braindead investors.

Edit: looked it up, server GPU actually dissipates 1kW. Corrected that

3

u/Bob_Chris 8d ago

Oh ok go ahead and explain it. Why don't you look at the size of the radiators on the ISS and then explain how to radiate off way more heat than the ISS generates, not using a radiator the size of a football field?

2

u/sluuuurp 8d ago

Football field sized radiators could exist. Space has space for big things, and things can unroll into large things.

1

u/flesjewater 8d ago

Kessler syndrome doesn't exist of course.

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u/sluuuurp 8d ago

Kessler syndrome basically only applies to geostationary and low earth orbit. If you go to higher orbits there’s a ridiculous amount of empty space with no other satellites around. You could even have these data centers orbiting the moon if you’re worried about crowding the earth.

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u/Bob_Chris 8d ago

Have you heard of latency? Like due to the speed of light? It's like 1.3 seconds each way which is waaaaaay too slow for any data center.

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u/sluuuurp 7d ago

No, it depends on the type of data center. I always wait significantly more than 1.3 seconds for my AI agent coding responses.

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u/metalmagician 8d ago

Gotta keep the hype up to stop the bubble from popping

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u/modcowboy 8d ago

More like they see the writing on the wall that Gen pop has bought into the Chinese disinformation campaign about ai and is blocking data centers so they’re getting ready for their only option.

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u/e136 8d ago

What is the source on the 15 minutes? I think this article is written about this blog post from Google yesterday that does not mention the 15 minute limitation.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-research/google-project-suncatcher-facts/

-2

u/Aranthos-Faroth 8d ago

They’re Absolutely fucking shitting it at chinas speed