India, Nov. 8 -- Tech giant Google has announced "Project Suncatcher," a new research initiative aimed at scaling machine learning capabilities in space.

The company said the moonshot project seeks to explore whether an interconnected network of solar-powered satellites, equipped with Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI chips, could harness sunlight to run large-scale compute systems in orbit.

In a post on X, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote: "Inspired by our history of moonshots, from quantum computing to autonomous driving, Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space, harnessing more of the Sun's power (which emits more power than 100 trillion times humanity's total electricity pr...