Google launched Project Suncatcher, a prototype space-based data center, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket earlier this month. The satellite carries four Google Tensor Processing Units and generates up to 1 kW of electricity. Engineers tested the satellite’s subsystems for about three weeks before the AI model was activated.
The onboard Google DeepMind Gemma 4 model successfully generated a haiku about space after receiving a prompt from engineers. Google plans to launch two more satellites with advanced chips in 2027 to test inter-satellite optical links. The project is unique in planning high-speed links between satellites for coherent distributed workloads.
Google is testing how TPUs perform under thermal stress and real space radiation, which can cause bit flips. The company stated that radiation is expected to have a minimal impact on inference workloads compared to training. The satellite’s power demands limit it to running a single TPU for approximately 20 minutes at a time.
