Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Google Put Four AI Chips in Orbit to Chase Sunlight With No Neighbors to Object. The Engineer Running It Says It Won't Be Cheaper Than Earth for at Least Five Years

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Google Put Four AI Chips in Orbit to Chase Sunlight With No Neighbors to Object. The Engineer Running It Says It Won't Be Cheaper Than Earth for at Least Five Years · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the data center just left the planet. NPR reported that on Thursday, October first, Google put a satellite the size of a refrigerator into orbit, with four of its own AI chips on board.
• 0:15
  [Guest] The project is called Suncatcher, and it rode up on a SpaceX rocket out of California. Google says the satellite has checked in and is working as expected.
• 0:25
  [Host] Four chips? My laptop has a few of those, so why is this news?
• 0:29
  [Guest] Because of what it's testing. These are the chips Google runs in its data centers on the ground, and it wants to know if they survive the launch, the radiation and the heat while running on nothing but sunlight.
• 0:43
  [Host] We have sunlight down here. Why go to all that trouble?
• 0:47
  [Guest] Down here it goes away every night. This satellite flies a path where its panels are almost never in shade, so it carries no heavy batteries. Google says a panel up there makes up to eight times the power it would on Earth.
• 1:02
  [Host] There's a second reason though, isn't there? Nobody launches a rocket just to skip the batteries.
• 1:08
  [Guest] NPR put it in one line. Orbit is where there is virtually unlimited free energy and no protesters.
• 1:14
  [Host] No protesters. So part of this is getting away from the neighbors.
• 1:19
  [Guest] It's getting away from everything a data center needs permission for, the land, the water, the place in line for the grid. Google's chief executive said this spring that demand for AI is running ahead of supply. He expects to spend more than a hundred and eighty billion dollars this year building to catch up.
• 1:38
  [Host] So how close is it? If my town is fighting a data center tonight, can we relax because it's all moving to space?
• 1:46
  [Guest] No, and the person saying no is the man running the project. Travis Beals told NPR he doesn't see this being cheaper than Earth in the next five years, and he thinks it will take longer than that.
• 1:59
  [Host] What's the holdup? The sun is free.
• 2:02
  [Guest] Heat is the holdup. On the ground you cool a chip with air or water, and a vacuum has neither. So the satellite carries radiators, Beals says they're among the heaviest things on board, and heavy is expensive to launch.
• 2:16
  [Host] How bad is it right now?
• 2:18
  [Guest] Those four chips can run an AI model for fifteen minutes at a time. Then they have to stop and cool off.
• 2:26
  [Host] Fifteen minutes. That's a toaster with a view.
• 2:29
  [Guest] Beals himself called it a very minimal test. Next year Google plans two more satellites, to see if they can talk to each other by laser. The real thing would need whole clusters of them flying together.
• 2:42
  [Host] Then the escape hatch is real, but it's years out. What happens down here in the meantime?
• 2:48
  [Guest] The building stays on the ground, and so does the bill. The same day as the launch, NPR ran a second story on who pays for data center power. One estimate out of Maryland has households there paying roughly a hundred seventy to two hundred fifteen dollars more a year, mostly because of the data center boom.
• 3:08
  [Host] That's a real line on a real bill. And the satellite does nothing for it?
• 3:13
  [Guest] Not for years, by the project's own account. Beals expects ground and orbit to coexist for a long time. Every campus built in that stretch still plugs into somebody's grid, next to somebody's house.
• 3:25
  [Host] Let me argue the other side. If orbit works someday, the hungriest machines leave and the grid gets its room back, so isn't that good for those households?
• 3:35
  [Guest] It could be, though NPR notes the rockets burn fuel going up and the satellites burn up coming down. What I'd watch is the thing pulling the industry toward orbit. Up there, nobody has to be asked.
• 3:48
  [Host] And being asked matters that much?
• 3:50
  [Guest] It's the only leverage a town has. A town that can say no can also say, bring your own power, pay for the substation, keep it off my bill. Put the building where there are no neighbors and that conversation never happens.
• 4:05
  [Host] So who is all that free sunlight for?
• 4:08
  [Guest] Today, whoever owns the satellite. Energy without limit that one company can reach is a private supply, however clean it is.
• 4:15
  [Host] Which is the reverse of what Patrick Deglon calls the Foundation in Unscarcity, where energy is shared infrastructure and everybody gets a baseline. Google just showed you can reach the sun without asking anyone.
• 4:27
  [Guest] And until that pays for itself, the asking still happens on the ground, one town meeting and one electric bill at a time. For more on who pays for AI's power and who gets a say in where it's built, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.