The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.
Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.
150kw design Launch on 4000kg is 4 million. 150kw solar Radiator Electronics
20/watt is 3 million. We are above your budget.
One of the "holy grail" things the military has wanted for a long time is to be able to treat a satellite not just like a bent pipe repeater but to do active signal processing and data processing such as for communication between disparate air and ground, naval units.
What do you need to distill a 24/7 stream of everything on Earth in roughly 1m^3 voxels into data like humans and vehicles? Bearing in mind the data torrent is gigantic and can't always be reliably downlinked: co-orbital AI.
I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.
But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.
NIMBY numbers rising on recent data center buildouts. People who think AI is going to destroy humanity. People experiencing real financial hardship due to AI job displacements.
If google is going to issue press releases, which sounds better ?
"Google putting data centers in space, not your backyard"
or
"Google testing TPU chips for doomsday skynet laser weapons"
The boys at the pentagon procurement department can read between the lines.
I was trying to rack my head for any possible way this made sense and was coming up empty. Normally i mistrust conspiracy theories like this, but its the only explanation that seems remotely plausible.