Google Suncatcher Prototype Space Data Center Goes Online

Google's first prototype space data center satellite, Suncatcher, is online and communicating with ground stations after launching earlier this month aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside more than 100 other spacecraft. The satellite carries four Google Tensor Processing Units and generates up to one kilowatt of electricity, but power and thermal limits allow only one TPU to operate for about 20 minutes at a time. After roughly three weeks of commissioning subsystems, engineers sent a prompt to Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model preloaded on the satellite, asking it to write a haiku about space and to report orbital conditions. Google said the satellite was operating nominally. The mission is intended to validate whether Google's TPU hardware can support orbital inference workloads under real space conditions. Although the company has exposed the chips to radiation using particle accelerators on Earth, the on-orbit campaign will assess how actual radiation, thermal stress, and memory bit flips affect performance. Ground testing suggested inference workloads may be more tolerant of radiation than training workloads, but the satellite tests will determine how those assumptions hold in orbit. A successful demonstration could support a broader plan for networks of closely flying satellites that perform large inference workloads together in space. Google plans to launch two additional satellites equipped with advanced chips in 2027, with higher power generation and inter-satellite optical links to distribute computing tasks. The concept depends on the availability of SpaceX's Starship, which is still in development and needed for both Google and SpaceX orbital data-center plans, especially if the rocket becomes fully and rapidly reusable. Alphabet, Google's parent company, also holds a significant investment stake in SpaceX.