Google spinoff Aalyria salvages Project Loon technology for the US military

Enlarge / Aalyria's vision of a connected Earth, though SpaceX's Starlink network basically already looks like this. (credit: Aalyria)

A pair of reports from CNBC and Bloomberg are detailing a new Google connectivity spinoff called "Aalyria." The new company sounds like it's taking the canceled Project Loon technology, packaging it up under a new brand name, and spinning it out from Alphabet as an independent company, where it will hopefully survive in the wilderness. The company is apparently going public today, complete with a spiffy new website.

Project Loon was a Google/Alphabet company for eight years and wanted to provide Internet for low-connectivity areas with flying cell towers suspended overhead by weather balloons. It's sort of the same idea as a low Earth orbit satellite, but rather than a satellite in space, these balloons were only 20 km in the air. Besides needing to constantly navigate the varying atmospheric airways, Loon balloons have to be continually recovered and relaunched to maintain a steady stream of overhead balloons. Besides being a reference to the big weather balloons, the name "Loon" was chosen as a nod to how infeasible the idea sounds. Eventually that infeasibility proved to mostly just be a money problem, and Google shut down Loon in 2021, saying it wasn't a "long-term, sustainable business."

The CNBC report paints the spinoff as yet another consequence of Google CEO Sundar Pichai's plan to cut costs at Google. Pichai said in August that "productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be" and that the company would be "consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes." CNBC says that the push for cost-cutting means Google is looking to "advance or wind down experimental projects." Some Alphabet companies, like Waymo, have taken external funding to stay afloat.

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