Google has put its own AI chips in orbit, in what Planet calls the first test of them in space. A prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher, built with satellite maker Planet, launched on Thursday, Oct. 1, aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Google says it has confirmed contact with the satellite and that it is operating as expected. Planet, which flew 19 of its own satellites on the same launch, says it has also made initial contact and begun commissioning, the process of checking the satellite out.
The satellite carries Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, the company's own AI chips. Google says that over the coming weeks it will collect data on how they cope with the shaking of launch, radiation, and the heat and cold of orbit.
The bigger question is whether AI computing could one day move off the planet. Google calls Suncatcher a long-term research moonshot and says satellites in low Earth orbit can generate up to eight times more solar power than panels on the ground. Its plan is clusters of satellites, each carrying dozens of TPU chips, that talk to each other by laser. Google says it will test those laser links in 2027 with two satellites in orbit. Google says a peer-reviewed paper on the research is now out in the journal Joule.
So far, the evidence comes from ground tests that Google itself reports. The company says it ran its Trillium TPUs in a proton beam at UC Davis while they worked on AI tasks, and that initial results show they can survive more radiation than a five-year mission would deliver. It says individual chips can face forces of 50 to 100 times gravity during launch. Cooling works differently in space, where there is no air to carry heat away and heat can leave only through radiators. Google says it has tested its heat pipes and radiators only in a vacuum chamber on the ground so far.
This is a single test satellite, not a data center. Google has not said how many chips are on board, how long the satellite will operate beyond the first weeks of data collection, what it cost, or when it will publish the results. Whether computing in orbit could ever compete on cost with data centers on the ground is still unknown.