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The story
On September 24, Google announced it will launch its first test satellite next week as part of a plan to eventually run AI data centers in space. The goal is to confirm whether its in-house AI chips function normally in space, where orbit is said to allow solar power generation up to 8 times that possible on the ground. On 5ch’s science news board, users debated physical challenges like chip degradation from cosmic rays and the impossibility of heat dissipation and maintenance, versus arguments that it makes sense given power shortages and land constraints on Earth — and the discussion eventually broadened into criticism of how Japan approaches technological development.
Google unveils plan for a data center in space, to launch first test satellite — capable of 8x the solar power generation possible on the ground
[New York — Takeshi Kise] On the 24th, US tech giant Google announced it will launch its first test satellite within the next week, as part of its plan to eventually operate AI (artificial intelligence) data centers in space.
The launch aims to confirm whether its in-house-developed AI chips and other hardware function normally in space.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
If it can survive sloppy overseas shipping, 10G is nothing
If that were true, Starlink would've been wiped out already
SpaceX's IPO prospectus projects revenue from Anthropic and Google
If the chips degrade or become obsolete you can't replace them — so are you just going to throw them away?
Doesn't seem practical
Isn't that basically how container-type data centers already work?
I don't think anyone's swapping out boards one by one anyway.
I wonder about that too, but the ISS manages to operate, so maybe they can dissipate enough heat somehow
Otherwise, packing that much equipment together tanks the MTBF (mean time between failures),
but I guess they can just treat it as disposable lol
must mean the upsides (no location constraints, 24-hour solar power) outweigh the downsides (can't swap out precision hardware, hard to dissipate heat)
but launching a ton of short-lived satellites that burn up in the atmosphere quickly might actually work
though I imagine that means heavy metals raining down on the whole planet
If wars or conflicts keep happening, data centers will keep being targeted,
so maybe this is one countermeasure for that.
it's going to be full of hazardous objects moving at insane speeds
It's not just companies — apartment buildings would become part of it too,
with a solar-power-style arrangement where unused capacity gets bought up.
On that note, Nvidia announced a partnership last year too, for an in-home wall-mounted data center system that includes the GPU.
There was a startup selling wall-embedded units for homes — I think it was founded as part of a smart home business.
I didn't research any of this while writing it, so look up the facts yourself.
The US just keeps experimenting away.
Investors decide whether something's viable or not.
Unlike Japan, where it's always "we can definitely do it," "All Japan" unity, and "it's tax money!" — which always ends up just falling behind.
Maybe just think of a way to solve it instead
It's not even about being negative — we don't even have the resources to plan anything
Building AI data centers in space, where environmental concerns barely apply, makes sense.
Cost is still an issue though.
and it comes with a concrete explanation of who did what and how that logic follows.
In Japan, it's just generic info with no logic about who said what and when — the media just tosses around this-and-that information.
"the government/a company can do this amazing thing"
"wow, impressive"
Since it's about their own turf, all they do is brag.
There's no logically improving things as a society,
no logically refuting things either.
It just turns into a good/bad evaluation.
Since it's an evaluation, it's always a conclusion,
and then outsiders get worked up arguing whether it's usable or not.
Whoever puts out the information has no continuity.
It's just like political elections —
a snap good/bad judgment in the moment,
then everyone forgets about it.
You just disconnect any broken TPU from the system, and since the satellites are
designed to run as a big cluster anyway, a few failures just mean
a bit less compute — no real problem.
On top of that, apparently a lot of ground server failures happen because
humans are wandering around nearby (accidentally snagging a cable, that sort of thing),
so a fully unmanned satellite might actually break down less than you'd expect.
Which means it'll degrade 8x faster than on the ground too.
Huge temperature swings, intense cosmic radiation — the silicon crystal itself takes damage.
Probably track the failure rate per block, and once a block exceeds some threshold, just dump it back to Earth
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Behind this plan lies the fact that ground-based data centers are running up against the limits of power and cooling capacity. In space, solar power can be generated stably around the clock, but as a flip side, the vacuum prevents heat dissipation through convection, and cosmic rays combined with extreme temperature swings make chips prone to degradation. This is exactly where opinions in the thread split: some argued that if maintenance isn’t possible, a disposable approach — just disconnecting broken blocks — is fine, while others pointed out that if it can generate 8 times the solar power of the ground, it should also degrade 8 times as fast. Looking only at the headline’s “8x the solar power of the ground” makes it easy to see this as a simple advantage, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the article itself doesn’t mention the flip-side costs of faster degradation and heat dissipation. There was also a mention that SpaceX is likewise investing in satellite data centers, so this should be read not as Google’s idea alone, but as a trend multiple companies are pursuing in parallel.
*This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (Science News+) thread “Google unveils plan for a data center in space, to launch first test satellite — capable of 8x the solar power generation possible on the ground.”
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