Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1

PUBLISHER ARTICLE PREVIEW

From the original article

Google’s experimental orbital data center will have four TPUs and only run for 15 minutes at a time.

Google is taking its first step toward making Project Suncatcher a reality. Announced last year, Suncatcher is Google’s “moonshot” effort to design orbital AI data centers, which AI boosters like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have pitched as an alternative to divisive terrestrial data centers. Google’s first experimental satellite will launch on October 1 with the aim of validating Google’s vision for a constellation of AI satellites.

The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads. On Earth, a data center will run thousands of these chips, which consume massive amounts of power—one of the reasons putting solar-powered AI hardware in space is so attractive.

MVP is starting small, with solar panels that supply only about one kilowatt of power, The New York Times reports. That’s enough to power a microwave or a