Google's first data center satellite is now online and communicating with the ground, having launched earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The prototype, part of Google's Suncatcher project, carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity - enough to power exactly one TPU for about twenty minutes at a time, which is a fun new twist on the already tricky business of space-to-ground communications.

After a roughly three-week commissioning process testing the satellite's subsystems, engineers were ready to work. Their first prompt this week asked the pre-loaded model - Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 - to write a haiku about being in space. The result:

Blue marble below

Data streams in silent grace

Starlight feeds my core. ✨

Google also tested the model with space-themed limericks (they should have sent a poet?) and, more importantly, asked the spacecraft to report on orbital conditions around the satellite. A spokesperson told TechCrunch the satellite was operating nominally - which, in space terms, is the best you can hope for.

The ongoing test campaign will examine how the chips perform under thermal stress and in the space radiation environment. Google has extensively tested its TPUs in particle accelerators on Earth, but now needs to see how radiation's real effects on hardware in space affect the processor. Radiation can cause 'bit flips' - flipping a stored value in computer memory - which can corrupt data without triggering typical monitoring tools. Ground tests suggested the impact would be minimal for inference workloads and more of a problem for training a model, but now the team gets to assess those dynamics in reality, not a simulation.

If the TPU onboard this spacecraft proves capable, the next step is launching two more satellites equipped with the advanced chips in 2027. Those spacecraft will support higher power generation and demonstrate inter-satellite optical links. Google's Starcloud project is largely alone among space-based data center visions in planning high-speed links between satellites to support coherent distributed workloads; SpaceX's data centers are also expected to use laser links but will orbit too far apart to share processing effectively. Companies like Starcloud and Cowboy Space expect to perform inference loads on individual satellites.

Google and SpaceX's visions are closely linked. Alphabet, Google's parent company, holds a significant investment stake in SpaceX. And to launch their orbital data centers, both companies will require Starship - the still-in-development heavy-lift rocket at the center of Elon Musk's space vision - to be fully and rapidly reusable. In a peer-reviewed analysis published earlier this month, Suncatcher researchers estimated that SpaceX would need to fly Starship 1,800 times to achieve the same learning-driven cost reductions it saw with its earlier vehicles.

Suncatcher is a classic Google moonshot - the company's focus is on designing infrastructure that will be economical in the 2030s. Getting there, however, may depend on how the rest of the company responds to the pressures and opportunities of AI in the near term. Alphabet saw its stock plunge this week after reporting that efforts to insert AI into its search businesses are hurting ad revenue growth. So the satellite can write poetry, but the stock price is the one writing tragedy.

Correction: The Suncatcher prototype satellite has four TPUs onboard, but can only operate one at a time.