Google has set an ambitious timetable to begin placing artificial intelligence infrastructure in orbit as early as 2027, in a project that could eventually shift a significant portion of the world’s data-centre capacity beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet and Google, confirmed that the company intends to launch its first “tiny racks of machines” into space in 2027 under an initiative known internally as Project Suncatcher. The long-term goal is to operate large-scale data centres powered directly by solar energy in orbit, bypassing terrestrial constraints on land, cooling water and grid capacity.
“We are taking our first step in ’27,” Mr Pichai said. “We’ll send small satellite-based systems, prove the concept, and then scale from there.” He added that within a decade it could become “perfectly normal” to build and operate data centres off-planet.
The move is the latest attempt by the technology industry to address the surging energy demands of generative artificial intelligence. Data centres already account for roughly 2-3 per cent of global electricity consumption, a figure the International Energy Agency predicts could double by 2030 if AI adoption continues at its current pace. Google itself has faced criticism after its greenhouse gas emissions rose 13 per cent in 2024, largely due to AI-related power requirements.
Project Suncatcher aims to sidestep these terrestrial bottlenecks by capturing uninterrupted solar energy in space — where panels are not subject to night-time darkness or atmospheric absorption — and beaming power back to Earth or using it directly for computation in orbit. Mr Pichai noted that the sun delivers “one hundred trillion times more energy than we produce on Earth today”.
In a separate podcast appearance last week, he revealed that Google hopes to have one of its proprietary Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the specialised chips that power its AI models, operating in space by 2027.
The announcement comes amid mounting regulatory and environmental scrutiny of hyperscale data centres. Earlier this autumn, the United Nations Environment Programme warned that the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure risks significant ecological damage unless offsetting measures are found quickly.
While orbital data centres remain highly speculative and face formidable technical hurdles — including radiation hardening, thermal management in vacuum, and reliable high-bandwidth links to Earth — Google’s timetable places it at the forefront of what some industry watchers have begun calling the “space compute race”.
Alphabet did not respond to requests for additional comment.
Investors appeared unfazed by the moonshot rhetoric; Alphabet shares closed marginally higher in Monday trading, in line with broader market gains. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.84 per cent, while the S&P 500 added 0.25 per cent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 0.39 per cent.
