Google's space data centre prototype satellite goes live

On 31 October 2026, TechCrunch reported that the prototype space data centre for Google's Project Suncatcher has gone live and communicated with the ground. The satellite carries four TPUs and generates up to 1 kW of power; power constraints mean only one TPU can run at a time for about twenty minutes. The report also said the satellite used Gemma 4 to write poetry in orbit. The Verge reported the same day that the satellite successfully started its onboard TPUs, with the on-board Gemma 4 model generating a haiku about space from a prompt and sending it back to Earth; Google said it also tested other space-themed doggerel and telemetry prompts, and will next assess how the TPUs perform under orbital thermal stress and radiation exposure, saying that verifying TPUs can reliably run workloads in space is a prerequisite for the two-satellite interconnection milestone in 2027. The satellite was launched into orbit earlier this month. Progress so far: the prototype satellite is live, has completed communications with the ground and has generated AI responses in orbit, with on-orbit compute operations constrained by power.

Written by AI from the reports · updated 3 h ago