Google's First Data Center in Space Is Up, and It Opened With a Haiku

Every big tech company is scrambling to find enough power and land for AI data centers. Google is testing a wild alternative: put them in orbit. On Friday, the company said its prototype satellite, Suncatcher, is up and running and talking to the ground.

The satellite went up earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside more than 100 other spacecraft. Planet Labs built it, and inside is a single Google Tensor Processing Unit, the chip Google uses for AI. It can generate up to 1 kilowatt of power from the sun, but the chip is so hungry it can run for only about 20 minutes at a time.

After about three weeks of checking every system, engineers gave it a first job. They asked Gemma 4, a Google DeepMind model loaded onto the satellite, to write a haiku about being in space. It answered: "Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core." They also had it write space-themed limericks and report on orbital conditions. Google says everything is working normally.

The poetry is a cute demo, but the real test is tougher. Space is full of radiation, which can flip bits and quietly corrupt data without setting off normal alarms. Ground tests suggested that's a small problem for running AI models but a bigger one for training them. Now Google gets to see if that holds up in orbit, along with how the chip handles heat.

Next up are two more satellites in 2027 with more advanced chips, more power and laser links between them. Google calls this a long-term moonshot aimed at the 2030s, and it'll need SpaceX's Starship to become cheap and fully reusable to really work. Starcloud and others are chasing the same idea.