Looking ahead: Google may not be taking as many audacious moonshots as it did in its early years, but it remains at the forefront of global technological transformation, shaping how people work, communicate, and live. The company is now planning to revolutionize cloud computing services by deploying solar-powered data centers in space by 2027.
In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the recently announced Project Suncatcher, which aims to find more efficient ways to power energy-hungry data centers by harnessing solar energy and potentially making them more sustainable than traditional facilities.
The space-based data centers are expected to go online in a limited capacity in 2027, with Google planning to send "tiny racks of machines" into orbit on two prototype satellites through a tie-up with Planet. Pichai added that he expects extraterrestrial data centers to become fairly common within ten years, with companies building giant gigawatt-scale facilities in space to power the AI boom.
Google announced Project Suncatcher last month, describing it as the best solution to the enormous power requirements of AI data centers. According to the company, the initiative is a "research moonshot" that will leverage solar energy to run satellite swarms powered by Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that communicate with one another over laser links instead of fiber.
A 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report found that US data centers already use more than 4% of the country's electricity – putting a massive strain on power grids, driving up prices, and fueling protests in rural communities. Alarmingly, that figure is expected to rise to 12% by 2028 amid the continuing AI boom.
Google believes that scaling machine-learning compute in space will not only help meet AI data centers' insatiable demand for power, but also do so sustainably by substituting thermal power with solar.
The company is highly optimistic about the project and has published a preprint paper outlining plans to launch an interconnected network of solar-powered satellites running its TPU-based AI chips.
Google is not the only company bullish on data centers in space. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently claimed that space-based solar data centers will become common within the next 20 years and that they will also be more cost-effective than traditional data centers on Earth.