Thanks to SpaceX, Google’s first AI satellite is set to take off

Since the Suncatcher project was announced in November 2025, Google has been entertaining a simple idea: moving some of its artificial intelligence computations into orbit, where the sun never sets. The company is putting the idea into practice with a first test satellite developed alongside Planet, an Earth-imaging specialist, which will board SpaceX’s shared Transporter-18 mission in the coming days.On board are copies of Trillium, the generation of TPU chips that powers in-house models.

Radiation, extreme cold and 100 g: the qualifying test

Google first subjected its chips, designed for climate-controlled rooms, to a battery of ground tests: accelerations of 50 to 100 times gravity on some components, and proton beams delivering radiation doses exceeding those of a five-year mission. Thermal cycling in a vacuum chamber completed the ordeal. The test satellite now extends the experiment under real-world conditions, from launch vibrations to temperature swings in low Earth orbit. Its findings will inform the design of subsequent vehicles, each expected to carry dozens of chips.

The detour through space has an energy justification: in low Earth orbit, a solar panel avoids both night and clouds and generates up to eight times more energy than on the ground, a boon for processors whose appetite for power keeps growing. The next milestone is already set: in 2027, two satellites will need to communicate via laser links, like servers in the same data center connected by fiber.

A startup is already ahead

Starcloud, a fledgling backed by Nvidia, placed an H100 chip in orbit as early as November 2025, before training an artificial intelligence model on it in December 2025, a world first.Among the software running on this satellite is Gemma, an open model developed by Google: the tech giant’s first AI to have run in orbit has therefore done so on a competitor’s satellite.

Space computing will only become competitive if the launch price falls to around $200 per kilogram, which requires a sharp reduction in current rates. Yet the idea is gaining traction among the giants: Elon Musk is championing his own orbital data centers, and Meta is studying space-based solar energy to power its facilities.

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Source: Google