🛰️Google's Suncatcher Satellite Is Online With Four TPUs, Runs One at a Time

Your next inference job might run in orbit

Google's Suncatcher prototype is up and talking to the ground. It's a space data center with four Tensor Processing Units, and it's running. The satellite completed about three weeks of subsystem commissioning, and a spokesperson says it's operating nominally. It even wrote a haiku about being in space. Starlight feeds my core, indeed. Why should you care? Because the question here is whether AI compute can live off-planet at all. Radiation can cause bit flips that corrupt data without tripping your usual monitoring. If you run training jobs, that's a real risk. Google expects the impact to be minimal for inference, which means the first useful orbital workloads are probably the boring ones, not the training runs. The numbers are tight. The satellite generates up to 1 kW of electricity, and the TPUs are power-hungry enough that only one can run for about twenty minutes at a time. Google has tested these chips in particle accelerators on Earth, but space radiation and thermal stress are the real exam. Two more satellites with the chips are planned for 2027, with higher power generation and inter-satellite optical links. Watch the 2027 launches. If the optical links work, you get coherent distributed workloads in orbit. If they don't, this stays a science project.