Google’s prototype space data center is online and talking to the ground. The Suncatcher satellite launched earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and after about three weeks of commissioning, engineers sent it a prompt. The satellite answered with a haiku.
Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core. ✨
The request asked the model, Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4, to write a haiku about being in space. Google said it also tested the model with space-themed limericks. The company asked the spacecraft to report on the orbital conditions around it, and a spokesperson told TechCrunch the satellite is operating nominally.
What hardware does Google's Suncatcher satellite carry?
The satellite carries four Google Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, and generates up to 1 kilowatt of electricity. Those chips are the reason the mission matters. Google designed Suncatcher as a step toward networks of closely flying satellites that could run large AI inference workloads in orbit. The power demands of the TPUs are a constraint, though. The satellite can only run one of its four chips at a time, and the chip draws enough power that it can stay on for only about 20 minutes at a stretch. That complicates space-to-ground communication, which is already difficult.
Can Google's TPUs survive radiation in orbit?
The mission is far from over. Google has tested its TPUs extensively in particle accelerators on Earth, but the real test is radiation in orbit. Radiation can cause “bit flips,” which change a stored value in computer memory. Those errors can corrupt data without setting off standard monitoring tools. Ground testing suggested radiation would have minimal impact on inference workloads but could be a bigger problem for training AI models. Now the team will see those effects in real conditions rather than in simulation.
“Next, we will continue with a series of tests to evaluate how TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation exposure in orbit,” Google said in a blog post on Friday. “Verifying our TPUs can reliably execute workloads in space paves the way for our next milestone of twin interconnected satellites in 2027.”
If the chips hold up, the next launch will carry two more satellites with the advanced TPUs. Those spacecraft will support higher power generation and demonstrate optical links between satellites.
Suncatcher stands apart from other space-based data center proposals in one key way. It plans high-speed links between satellites so they can run distributed workloads together. SpaceX’s planned data centers are also expected to use laser links, but they would orbit too far apart to share processing effectively, according to the report. Startups Starcloud and Cowboy Space expect to run inference workloads on individual satellites instead.
Why does Google's orbital data center plan depend on Starship?
Google and SpaceX are closely connected in this effort. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, holds a significant investment stake in SpaceX. Both companies would need Starship, the heavy-lift rocket still in development under Elon Musk, to become fully and rapidly reusable before launching orbital data centers at scale. A peer-reviewed analysis published earlier this month by Suncatcher researchers estimated that SpaceX would need to fly Starship 1,800 times to achieve the same learning-driven cost reductions it saw with earlier vehicles.
The project is a long-term bet. Suncatcher is designed to be economical in the 2030s, and getting there may depend on how the rest of Google handles near-term AI pressures. Alphabet’s stock fell sharply this week after the company reported that its efforts to add AI to search are hurting ad revenue growth.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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