Google's Suncatcher satellite online with TPUs

Google's first data center satellite, named Suncatcher, is online and communicating with the ground. The spacecraft carries four Google Tensor Processing Units, though it can only operate one at a time for about twenty minutes due to power demands. The satellite was ready to work after a commissioning process that tested its subsystems over about three weeks. Engineers sent a prompt to Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model pre-loaded on the satellite to write a haiku. Google also tested the model with space-themed limericks and asked the spacecraft to report on orbital conditions. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that the satellite was operating nominally.

The ongoing test campaign will examine how the chips perform under thermal stress and in the space radiation environment. Google plans to launch two more satellites equipped with advanced chips in 2027 if the current TPU proves capable. These future satellites will support higher power generation and demonstrate inter-satellite optical links. The Suncatcher project plans high-speed links between satellites to support coherent distributed workloads. Alphabet holds a significant investment stake in SpaceX, and both companies require Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable for their orbital data centers. Suncatcher researchers estimated that SpaceX would need to fly Starship 1,800 times to achieve specific cost reductions. Google's Project Suncatcher is a moonshot focused on designing infrastructure economical in the 2030s.