Overview
- Sundar Pichai said on a podcast that he hopes Google will have one of its custom TPUs operating in space by 2027 and described the effort as a moonshot.
- Elon Musk claimed Starship could place roughly 300 to 500 gigawatts per year of solar-powered AI satellites into orbit, far beyond today’s terrestrial data center capacity.
- Jeff Bezos predicted space-based data centers could arrive in 10 to 20 years, while Marc Benioff argued space offers continuous solar power and simpler cooling.
- Industry experts cited unresolved hurdles including latency, bandwidth limits, radiation, micrometeorites, thermal control, launch emissions, and maintenance, saying widespread use is unlikely this decade.
- Proposals range from running compute on orbit to collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth, with legal responsibility and orbital debris concerns still open.