Supercomputers in space: China leads race for AI data hubs in Earth orbit as Musk, Bezos and Pichai also fight it out

The race to conquer space has now moved to artificial intelligence as countries vie to launch AI infrastructure into low-Earth orbit. China is believed to be leading in this arena and is reportedly working to place space supercomputers above Earth soon. Researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing are preparing to launch an AI data centre. This structure will include 10,000 high-performance computing cards, Popular Mechanics reported. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are also developing these cosmic AI hubs, and whoever manages to have the most perfect space centres will lead computing in space.

NVIDIA-backed startup Starcloud is potentially winning this race. Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit managed to get its Starcloud-1 satellite past Earth’s atmosphere last month. It not only launched an 80-gigabyte chip, but also trained the NanoGPT large language model from Terra Firma. While the chip is 100 times more powerful than any chip that has ever been sent to space, NanoGPT is the first AI ever trained in space.

Bezos and Musk plan on having AI data hubs in orbit

Meanwhile, Blue Origin has been working on aI data hub for space for over a year, while Musk plans to upgrade Starlink satellites to handle AI computing payloads. Pichai confirmed Project Suncatcher, which will place micro-racks of machines on board satellites. Having AI infrastructure in space will reduce the huge amounts of energy and water the technology uses and reduce greenhouse gases. In space, it will rely on solar power, which means 10 times less use of electricity by the AI data centres.

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China is way ahead in this race and recently placed the first computing constellation in space. Guoxing Aerospace and the research institute Zhejiang Lab together deployed 12 satellites into low-Earth orbit. The constellation could be the foundation for an orbiting supercomputer in the future. Aerospace company Zhongke Tiansuan launched a space supercomputer in 2022, while Zhongke Tiansuan’s satellite is in stable orbit for more than a thousand days. This puts China way ahead of other countries in the quest to have AI hubs and supercomputers in space.

AI data centres in Earth's orbit are the future. The Starcloud team said in a white paper published last year, "Gigawatt-scale orbital data centres are among the most ambitious space projects of all time. We are convinced that orbital data centres are feasible, economically viable, and necessary to realise the potential of AI, the most important technology of the 21st century, in a rapid and sustainable manner."

This endeavour can soon become a reality as experts are sure that an actual supercomputer could be operational in space by the 2030s. However, who will be the first to launch one remains to be seen.