Google is sending its first AI data center to space

Google is preparing to put its AI chips somewhere no data center has gone before: low Earth orbit. The company’s Project Suncatcher prototype is scheduled to launch on October 1, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. The goal is simple to state and hard to pull off: find out whether Google’s custom AI hardware can survive, and actually work, in space. Calling it a data center is a little generous. The satellite is roughly the size of a refrigerator and carries about as much computing muscle as a single server rack slot back on Earth. It starts with four chips. What’s actually going up The prototype goes by the name MVP. It will ride to orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Google built the spacecraft together with Planet Labs, the satellite company. Inside are four Google Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. These are the custom chips Google designed specifically to run machine-learning workloads. Combined, those four TPUs deliver compute equivalent to one terrestrial data center server. Power comes from solar panels producing approximately 1 kW. The operating plan reflects those limits. The satellite will run short AI inferenc...