Four TPUs on a small satellite
Google has confirmed that its first Project Suncatcher satellite is operating as expected, weeks after it launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from California on 1 October. The spacecraft carries four Trillium tensor processing units, the same family of AI chips that power Google's Gemini models. Built with the satellite company Planet, the unit is roughly the size of a refrigerator and is designed to last about a year.
The idea is simple: in the right orbit a satellite sees sunlight almost all the time, with no clouds, weather or night. A solar panel there can generate several times the energy of the same panel on Earth, and Google argues space could eventually host cheaper computing for AI.
Heat, not air, is the hard part
Running AI chips in a vacuum brings engineering problems. There is no air to carry heat away, so fans cannot work. Instead, heat travels through copper and aluminium pipes to radiators that release it into space as infrared light. The satellite runs Gemini in bursts of about 15 minutes, then shuts the chips down to cool before another run.
The launch and space environment are brutal on semiconductors and their packaging. During launch the chips withstood forces of 50 to 100 times Earth's gravity. Before flight, Google blasted them with proton beams at the University of California, Davis, to simulate radiation. The chips showed no hard failures, and memory handled more than twice a five-year radiation dose before glitches appeared. The main danger in orbit is cosmic rays flipping bits in the middle of a calculation.
What comes next
Google had planned the experiment for 2027 and moved faster by placing its chips on a satellite Planet had already built. In 2027, two satellites are to test laser links that would let them talk to each other. The long-term plan is clusters of 81 satellites flying within one kilometre of each other, connected by lasers; a lab demonstration has already reached 800 gigabits per second.
The economics are still unproven. A one-gigawatt orbital computing cluster would need around 10,000 satellites, and the consultancy BCG estimates it would cost about $30 billion to build and launch today. Earth-based data centres remain far cheaper, and repairing hardware in orbit is difficult. Google is betting that falling launch costs close the gap.
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