I would be extremely unsurprised if some amount of the 'starshield' customized starlink satellites recently launched for the DoD have at least some modest amount of general purpose hypervisor/server capacity on them, possibly with limited GPU-like capabilities for certain software. At least as a small scale test.

One of the "holy grail" things the military has wanted for a long time is to be able to treat a satellite not just like a bent pipe repeater but to do active signal processing and data processing such as for communication between disparate air and ground, naval units.

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/usa-350.htm

Why would they need a cover story?

Terrestrial data centers are having a hard time connecting to power. What’s the good of a $40/Watt compute asset you can’t turn on? Spending $10 or even $20/Watt extra to get power by sending inference load to orbit starts to sound like a bargain, and that’s doable with today’s launch vehicles. With high reuse, that number drops to below $1/Watt for 24/7 power, which makes it cheaper than any terrestrial energy source. And the vast majority of compute load is inference. Part of the training process benefits from a large, coherent (ie low latency) data center, but that’s a minority of the load nowadays.

Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.

What would a radar constellation look like that could see everything on earth to a metre or so resolution? Thousands and thousands of satellites all with big phased array radios and solar panels and batteries.

What do you need to distill a 24/7 stream of everything on Earth in roughly 1m^3 voxels into data like humans and vehicles? Bearing in mind the data torrent is gigantic and can't always be reliably downlinked: co-orbital AI.

Maybe. But it’s also Google, a company famous for just spending money on random crap. Data centers are politically toxic right now, and Elon Musk’s bloviating made it trendy to discuss AI in space. Maybe they think that following this trend with a relatively simple launch will raise the stock.

I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.

But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.