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Pichai says Google's Project Suncatcher space data centers have an early milestone coming

AISundar Pichai says Google will soon have a "hello world" moment for Project Suncatcher, its space data center effort, and will test its TPUs there. He says the team is at early steps but is committed to a 10-to-20-year journey, citing access to 24/7 energy in sun-synchronous orbits as a key reason.
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Sundar Pichai on Google's new space data center effort, Project Suncatcher:

"We will have a nice 'hello world' moment coming up... We'll get a chance to say hello to the TPUs, which I'm really excited about.

I think we are taking the early steps, but we are deeply committed to the journey. The team is world-class, and in a 10-to-20-year time frame, they're going to have amazing milestones. That's what I'm excited about.

If you think through it from a first-principles standpoint, with energy availability and sun-synchronous orbits, getting access to 24/7 energy is a pretty good reason. There'll be more reasons, I think.

We have so many opportunities to use the physical space, the constrained physical space on planet Earth. The data centers today look big to us, but they are not... It is tough for us to exponentially extrapolate our compute needs 20 years out, so I don't think Earth would look nice if that's how you plan to do it."

Alex Heath@alexeheath
Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch Even Google can’t get enough compute. I sit down with Google and Alphabet CEO @sundarpichai shortly after the wider release of Gemini 4 Argon to discuss its early reception, where he still wants the model to improve, and what it takes to keep Google at the frontier of AI. Pichai explains the recent leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind and why building frontier models has become an “all-consuming” job. We also get into Google’s answer to the personal agent race, how he predicts Gemini will do more work on your behalf, and whether agents will finally bring Search, Gmail, and Gemini together. I ask him about Google turning free cash flow negative, the risks in the AI infrastructure buildout, and how he plans for demand years before knowing what the models will be capable of. He explains the signals giving him confidence to keep spending and how he uses AI agents to follow model development and compute usage inside Google. Timestamps: 00:00 Gemini Argon launch reception 01:49 Model access and safety 06:20 The AI model race 08:35 Agentic breakthroughs and 2027 11:34 Recursive self-improvement 15:41 DeepMind leadership changes 19:52 Google's AI compute investments 25:20 Is AI spending sustainable? 33:18 How Sundar uses AI agents 35:35 Gemini's personal agent plans 38:37 How AI agents change the web 43:52 Google's space data centers 47:38 Waymo's expansion strategy 50:26 Wing's drone delivery plans 51:36 AI safety and regulation 55:58 Google's quantum computing bet YouTube: https://youtu.be/fJBSNEFdm8c Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0cJBqmVz3CWJSPdmBOeJGu?si=NBxJIMhZRgikafPtwY0sZA Substack: https://sources.news/p/sundar-pichai-gemini-4-google-other-bets Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sundar-pichai-on-gemini-4-and-the-ai-compute-crunch/id1840154537?i=1000797461022 This episode's presenting sponsor is @hyperagentapp. Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: @Atlassian, @meetgranola, and @mercury.
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Original title: Sundar Pichai on Google's new space data center effort, Project Suncatcher:

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