Artificial Intelligence companies are planning to invest incredible sums – more than a trillion dollars per year by OpenAI alone – Construction of huge data centers that consume abundant electricity, generate pollution and occupy a lot of space.
They have also been blamed for negative impacts on local water supplies, and many NoiseDue to which he became unpopular among the nearby residents.
Now, in an attempt to scale up operations while keeping the controversy aside, Many in the AI Industry Turned into an outrageous pitch: Operating data centers in outer space, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altmangoogle ceo Sundar PichaiCEO of Blue Origin jeff bezosand xAI Founder Elon Musk,
As critics have pointed out, beyond the concerns, the logistical hurdles are ridiculously high. economic viability To Bandwidth Limits,
But, credit where credit is due, there is now proof of concept. With the support of AI chip maker Nvidia, a startup called StarCloud launched a high-powered Nvidia GPU into outer space on a SpaceX rocket last month.
Since then, the company has got the chip up and running Google’s open-source large language model Gemma cnbc reportsThis is the first time AI has been run on a state-of-the-art chip in space. The company also says it has managed to train a small-scale LLM on the complete works of Shakespeare, resulting in an AI that can speak in Shakespearean English.
“Hello, Earthlings! Or, as I like to think of you – a charming collection of blue and green,” the AI wrote in a message. “Come see what wonders this view of your world reveals. I’m Gemma, and I’m here to observe, analyze, and perhaps sometimes offer a little disturbing insightful commentary.”
StarCloud CEO Philip Johnson told cnbc The concept is solid, and AI could significantly cut energy costs for companies.
“Whatever you can do in a terrestrial data center, I hope can be done in space,” he said. “And the reason we would do this is entirely because of the constraints that we face on energy at the terrestrial level.”
“Running advanced AI from space solves significant bottlenecks facing data centers on Earth,” he said, while also making progress on “environmental responsibility.”
As detailed in A white paperStarcloud has some pretty ambitious plans, especially when it comes to keeping operations quiet in space. While data centers on Earth can be cooled using water and air, things get more complicated when it comes to cooling AI chips in outer space.
Thus, the company wants to build a five gigawatt orbital data center cooled by giant cooling panel panels over an area of more than six square miles – and all powered 24/7 by solar power.
“Orbital data centers can directly take advantage of lower cooling costs by using passive radiative cooling in space to achieve lower coolant temperatures,” the white paper reads. “Perhaps most importantly, they can be scaled almost indefinitely without the physical or permitting constraints that come with Earth, using modularity to rapidly deploy them.”
The company claims that due to the unrestricted source of solar energy, the resulting data center’s solar panels will be dramatically smaller than an equivalent solar farm in the US.
In addition to cooling, running orbital data centers faces many other challenges, ranging from extreme levels of radiation that can potentially wreak havoc on electronics, maintaining enough fuel to stay in orbit, avoiding collisions with space junk, and questions about data regulation in space.
However, a growing number of companies believe that running data centers in orbit is the solution. Starcloud is far from the only entity exploring this idea. Google also recently revealed “Project Suncatcher” an initiative that aims to launch the company’s in-house tensor processing units into orbit.
While StarCloud has partnered with SpaceX to launch its chips, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is raising funds to acquire or partner with a competing private space company. wall street journal informed earlier this month.
“When Starcloud-1 looked down, it saw a world of blue and green,” Johnson said. cnbc“Our responsibility is to keep it that way,”
More information on orbital data centers: China is building an AI-powered supercomputer network in space
