Google Launches First Satellite Data Center Prototype, Tests AI in Orbit

Google’s Suncatcher satellite, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket earlier this month, is now online and communicating with ground stations. The 1‑kW spacecraft carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and runs Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 model, which generated a haiku about space when prompted. The TPUs can operate for roughly twenty minutes at a time due to power constraints, and the mission is testing how space radiation and thermal stress affect the chips’ reliability. Results will inform plans to deploy additional satellites in 2027 with higher power and inter‑satellite optical links as part of Google’s Starcloud project.