Google confirms its AI chips are working in orbit after Project Suncatcher test launch

Google put a data center server’s worth of AI chips on a satellite and sent it to orbit. According to the company, the chips are working as intended. The satellite, called MVP, is the first hardware flight test under Project Suncatcher. That is Google’s long-term bet that the best place to run AI might eventually be above the atmosphere, where sunlight is plentiful and the neighbors don’t complain about power bills. What Google actually launched MVP went up on October 1, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission. The spacecraft is roughly the size of a refrigerator. Inside are four Tensor Processing Units from Google’s Trillium generation. Together, the four chips deliver computing capacity equivalent to one data center server. Solar panels on the satellite generate approximately 1 kW of power to keep them running. After launch, Google confirmed the satellite is operating as designed. That makes this the first validation of the company’s AI hardware performing in space. The 15-minute workday MVP runs AI workloads in sessions of roughly 15 minutes before it has to shut down for cooling. Heat is the quiet villain of space computing. On Earth, data...