Chocolate Factory's latest moonshot aims to put AI supercomputing cluster in sun-sychronous orbit

Google on Tuesday announced a new moonshot – launching constellations of solar-powered satellites packed to the gills with its home-grown tensor processing units (TPUs) to form orbital AI datacenters.

"In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute," Google executives wrote in a blog post, in which they explain that solar panels can be eight times more efficient in space than on Earth, and can produce power continuously.

Availability of energy has become a limiting factor for terrestrial datacenter builds, so the prospect of an abundant source of clean uninterrupted energy is no doubt quite attractive.

However, as Google points out, realizing this plan requires it to overcome significant challenges, one of which is finding enough rockets to place a useful amount of infrastructure in orbit. Despite SpaceX being on track to conduct over 140 launches this year, launch capacity is not easy to come by.

Launch ...