Google’s first data center satellite is online and writing poetry

Google's Suncatcher prototype space data center is online and communicating with the ground after launching earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside more than 100 other spacecraft. The satellite carries four Google Tensor Processing Units and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, but can only run one TPU at a time for about twenty minutes, and engineers asked its pre-loaded Gemma 4 model to write a haiku about being in space. Google said the satellite is operating nominally, and the ongoing campaign will test how the chips perform under thermal stress and space radiation, with two more satellites planned for 2027.