Google: Inside the Project Suncatcher plan to put A.I. data centers into orbit.

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Earlier this month, Google researchers released a paper about “Project Suncatcher,” the company’s research “moonshot” to build data centers in space. The paper’s authors don’t mince words when it comes to the challenges the tech giant is facing from A.I.’s energy demands, and their planned solution is to launch “fleets of satellites” into space and harvest energy from the sun.

Google’s space-based data centers won’t be gigantic monolithic buildings like the data centers we have on Earth, but a “constellation of solar-powered satellites” carrying tensor processing units (the processors used to power Google’s A.I. systems). The paper boasts that the company’s data