Google is looking towards the cosmos to meet AI’s energy demand.

On Tuesday, the tech giant unveiled Project Suncatcher, an initiative to scale AI compute in space. The goal is to harness the power of the Sun via satellites in orbit and minimize the impact of AI infrastructure on “terrestrial resources,” the company said.

The initiative will equip “solar-powered satellite constellations” with Google’s Tensor Processing Units and inter-satellite links, keeping them in constant view of the sun in low-earth orbit to run on solar power perpetually. The first two prototype satellites for the project will be launched in 2027.

Google noted in its research paper that a solar panel can be eight times more productive in orbit than it is on Earth if placed in the proper orbit. “In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute,” Travis Beals, senior director of Project Suncatcher, wrote in the report.

Google’s initiative isn’t the first time we’ve seen companies seek creative solutions to AI’s energy and resource problems.

• Microsoft, for example, has filed a number of patent applications for inventions in recent years for systems that rely on cryogenic power, or cold energy, to power data centers.
• Nvidia, meanwhile, has partnered with Starcloud, a company that aims to deploy data centers in space, which on Monday launched its first satellite equipped with an Nvidia GPU.

Given the increasing competition among tech giants to accelerate AI development, the pressure is on to figure out how to fuel that growth.

“Moving some processing off-planet might ease the load on Earth’s power systems, but it also highlights a larger issue: as AI scales, careful planning for sustainable energy use becomes essential across the whole AI infrastructure,” Roman Eloshvili, founder of AI compliance firm ComplyControl, told The Deep View.

It’s no secret that AI is an energy hog. Global energy demand from data centers – driven largely by AI – is expected to double by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, with a growth rate of around 15% per year, or four times faster than the growth of total electricity demand from all other sectors. Still, tech companies continue to throw astronomical amounts of cash at massive AI infrastructure buildouts. Given the sheer energy demand of these facilities, whether energy infrastructure – clean or otherwise – can keep up remains unclear.