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Google's Suncatcher satellite powers up, runs first AI job in orbit

Power scarcity, not radiation, is the first hard limit space-based data centers must engineer around.

• Google's Project Suncatcher prototype satellite, launched October 1, 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare, came online this week and delivered its first AI-generated response from orbit.
• Suncatcher is Google's long-term research effort to test powering AI compute in space; the craft carries four data-center-class Tensor Processing Units running the Gemma 4 open model.
• The satellite generates up to 1 kW of electricity, enough to run only one of its four TPUs at a time for about 20 minutes, complicating both compute and ground communication.
• During a ground-station pass over Svalbard, Norway, engineers uplinked a prompt asking Gemma 4 to write a haiku about space, and the satellite downlinked the poem, confirming the first response from a data-center-class TPU in orbit.
• Google will next test how the TPUs handle thermal stress and space radiation, which can cause data-corrupting 'bit flips,' before launching two interconnected satellites with optical links in 2027.
• This early test shows that onboard power generation, not radiation hardening, is the binding constraint on running AI inference in orbit, shaping how fast orbital data centers can scale.