Google will launch TPUs on a SpaceX Falcon 9 October 1 under Project Suncatcher
Google is preparing to launch a satellite carrying its Tensor Processing Units, the company’s custom AI chips, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on October 1, The Verge‘s Emma Roth reports (Sep. 24). The flight is part of Project Suncatcher, Google’s experimental bid that could eventually put AI data centers into orbit. The goal is to measure how the chips handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space.
Google plans two satellites into orbit next year. Travis Beals, Project Suncatcher’s senior director of product management, tells the New York Times via Verge that the chips can only run about 15 minutes before they need to be turned off to cool down. In vacuum there is no air to carry heat away, so heat has to move through heat pipes and radiators instead of fans.
Google's research blog says the first orbit test flies on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX, developed in partnership with Planet. A rocket trip into low Earth orbit, the neighborhood of most satellites, lasts about 10 minutes with sustained acceleration up to 10 times the force of gravity. Ground radiation tests at UC Davis’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory found Trillium TPUs withstood more than a five-year mission dose while running AI workloads.
Google says panels in low Earth orbit can collect up to eight times more solar power than on the ground. Future designs would put dozens of TPU chips on each satellite and link clusters with high-bandwidth lasers. The next milestone is 2027, when two satellites test those laser links.
The Next Web notes Google research estimates launch prices need to fall to about $200 per kilogram for space compute to compete on cost. Nvidia-backed Starcloud launched an H100 last November and ran Google’s Gemma.
The same week Meta printed up to $145 billion of terrestrial AI barns, Google’s first move upstairs is a hardware-survival test. The vacuum heat problem is on the schedule before anyone prices a constellation.
Until flight data and cheaper launch prices both land, Project Suncatcher stays a survival test for the chips upstairs.