What Happened
Pioneering Space-Based Computing With Artificial Intelligence
Google’s Suncatcher satellite, a prototype space data center, is now online and communicating with the ground after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The satellite carries a single Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, intended to perform large inference workloads in orbit. After a commissioning process, the spacecraft was ready to work, and engineers on the ground tested the model pre-loaded onto the satellite, Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4, which wrote a haiku about being in space. The ongoing test campaign will examine how the chips perform under thermal stress and in the space radiation environment, as reported by TechCrunch.