In a recent interview with Fox News, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google will soon begin the construction of AI data centers in space.
- Sundar Pichai called “Project Suncatcher” one of the company's “moonshots” as it tries to better harness the energy from the sun.
- Pichai also said that a decade or so later, data centers in space will be viewed as the normal way to build them out.
- Beyond AI data centers in space, Elon Musk thinks the next step would be building satellite factories on the Moon.
Data centers in space could emerge as the next big thing in the coming years, and industry leaders, including Alphabet Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, have been voicing their takes.
On Tuesday, Atreidis Managing Partner Gavin Baker stated during an interview on the “Invest Like The Best” podcast that because of the “close to absolute zero” cooling costs in space and the possibility of using lasers to link satellites for communication, data centers in space are better than Earth-based data centers in terms of cost savings.
“If the satellites can communicate directly with the phone, and Starlink has demonstrated direct to cell capability, you just go ‘boom boom.’ It’s a much better, lower-cost user experience,” said Baker.
Just days before Baker’s comments, Pichai said in an interview with Fox News that Google will soon begin the construction of AI data centers in space as the company looks to harness the sun’s power.
“We want to put these data centers in space, closer to the sun, and I think we’re taking the first step in ‘27. We’ll send tiny, tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there,” he said.
The Google CEO called it one of the “moonshots” of the company as it tries to figure out a way to better harness the energy from the sun, which is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce on all of Earth right now.
Pichai also said that a decade or so later, data centers in space will be viewed as the normal way to build them out.
Musk Outlines The Logistics Involved
In a previous post on X, Musk outlined the logistics involved in this process. “Satellites with localized AI compute, where just the results are beamed back from low-latency, sun-synchronous orbit, will be the lowest cost way to generate AI bitstreams in <3 years,” he said, while adding that this is by far the fastest way to scale within four years.
Beyond this, Musk thinks the next step would be to build satellite factories on the Moon and use something like an electromagnetic railgun to accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity.
Major Players In This Space
SpaceX is among the world’s most prolific spaceflight companies, with 588 completed missions and 548 landings in total. The company is also currently building the Starbase in Texas for the development, manufacturing, testing, and launch of its Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket.
Google announced Project Suncatcher in November to equip solar-powered satellite constellations with its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and free-space optical links to eventually scale machine learning compute in space.
Redmond-based Starcloud Inc. is another company focusing on building data centers in space. It recently launched the first Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) H100 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) into space. Its first commercial satellite, Starcloud-2, features a GPU cluster, and it will be fully operational in a sun-synchronous orbit by 2026.
In April this year, Axiom Space announced plans to launch orbital data center nodes by the end of 2025. The company said these nodes would offer 2.5 gigabits per second-capable optical links to compatible satellites.
SpaceX is currently not listed, while Alphabet’s Class A shares were up 0.3% at the time of writing. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around SpaceX trended in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory, while users felt ‘bearish’ about Alphabet.
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