Google is in talks with SpaceX for a rocket launch deal as the search outfit expands its plan to sling data centres into orbit, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A deal would make the pair partners while they prepare to scrap over orbital data centres, an unproven wheeze that SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has been touting as the next frontier for his rocket outfit.
Google is talking to other rocket launch companies about a possible deal, one of the people said.
Speculative technology has become a centrepiece of SpaceX’s pitch to investors ahead of its planned public listing this summer, which is expected to be the largest IPO of all time.
Last year, Google announced plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 under its moonshot scheme, Project Suncatcher. It is working with Planet Labs to build the satellites.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview in November: “We’ll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there. There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centres.”
Google was an early investor in SpaceX and owns 6.1 per cent of the company, according to a regulatory filing.
Google executive Don Harrison sits on SpaceX’s board, which makes the whole thing a bit cosier than a normal launch contract. SpaceX is the leading commercial launch provider, meaning anyone wanting to put satellites into orbit has to deal with Musk’s rocket shop.
Last week, SpaceX announced a deal to sell Earthbound computing resources to AI outfit Anthropic. As part of the agreement, Anthropic expressed interest in working with SpaceX on orbital data centres.
Earlier this year, SpaceX filed an application with a federal regulator to launch up to a million satellites for its orbital data centre ambitions. Many industry leaders see orbital computing as a way around the limits of Earth-bound data centres, which need huge amounts of land and power.
These orbital rigs are meant to run on solar panels, cutting one of the biggest power headaches faced by data centres on Earth.
For its Anthropic deal, SpaceX will supply 300 megawatts of new computing capacity by the end of May. That will use more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
