🚀 China Begins Building the First Supercomputer in Space
China has launched the first 12 satellites of what will become the world's pioneering AI-powered orbital supercomputer.
Each satellite runs an astronomic AI model with 8 billion parameters, capable of analyzing sensor data and detecting electromagnetic bursts from distant cosmic events.
FUN FACT: The project, known as the Three-Body Computing Constellation, takes its name from Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy.
The hardware on board can perform up to 744 trillion operations per second (TOPS). For comparison: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 delivers around 1.3K TOPS on AI tasks. A basic chatbot needs just ~40 TOPS.
Once complete, the 2,800-satellite network will reach 1 million TOPS, with laser links transmitting data at up to 100 Gbps between nodes.
🔭 Why It Matters
Processing data directly in space means no need to send raw information back to Earth, saving time and increasing the amount of useful data we can access. Currently, less than 10% of satellite data is ever transmitted to the ground.
Plus, this orbital data center will consume far less energy than Earth-based clusters, developers say.
More on the topic:
✖️ Elon Musk's AI Supercomputer
🔭 Euclid Space Telescope: A Time Machine Searching for the Dark Universe
