On October 30, Google announced that its first test "data center" satellite in space is working and that it has received its first AI response from orbit. The first satellite of the project, called Project Suncatcher, carries the company's own AI chips, TPUs.
What happened?
The satellite was built together with the satellite company Planet and reached orbit on October 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, together with more than 100 other spacecraft. It carries four TPUs. After about three weeks of commissioning tests, engineers asked Gemma 4, the Google DeepMind model preloaded on the satellite, for a haiku about being in space. The answer came as the satellite passed over Norway's Svalbard islands: "Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core."
The hard part is energy. The satellite can generate at most 1 kilowatt of power; according to TechCrunch, that means only one TPU can run at a time, for about 20 minutes per session. Engineers will now measure how the chips cope with temperature swings and radiation. Radiation can cause bit flips in memory, silently corrupting data. Ground tests showed the chips stayed fine up to roughly three times the dose expected over five years; orbit will confirm this.
Why does it matter?
AI data centers on Earth consume huge amounts of electricity and cooling water. In space, solar energy is constant and plentiful. In 2027, Google will send two more powerful satellites and test laser data links between satellites. But the goal is long term: the company says this infrastructure could become economical only in the 2030s. That requires launch costs to drop sharply; according to a Suncatcher analysis, SpaceX might need to fly Starship 1,600 to 1,800 times.
A link from history
Running computers in space isn't a new idea, but the scale has changed enormously. The computer of Apollo 11, which flew to the Moon in 1969, ran on just a few kilobytes of memory. We told that story in our post Apollo 11's computer: what does "4 KB of memory" really mean?.