Google’s “Project Suncatcher” prototype satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission successfully went online and completed its first end-to-end AI workload from orbit. Responding to ground-station prompts sent as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway, the onboard Gemma 4 model generated a space-themed haiku: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.” The experimental spacecraft carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), though current solar power limitations restrict operation to a single chip at a time for roughly 20-minute windows. The primary goal of the mission is to test how custom AI chips withstand harsh thermal extremes and space radiation (such as silent data-corrupting bit flips) without traditional Earth-based cooling. If the orbital TPU proves resilient, Google plans to launch two additional satellites in 2027 featuring higher power generation and inter-satellite optical communication links to explore space-based AI infrastructure.

Full report : Under Project Suncatcher, a prototype spacecraft carrying custom Tensor Processing Units successfully runs Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 model in low Earth orbit.