Google says its Project Suncatcher satellite has sent back its first AI response from a TPU in orbit

Google says a prototype satellite built for its Project Suncatcher research programme has run an artificial intelligence model in orbit and sent the result back to Earth.

In a blog post on Friday, 30 October, Travis Beals, a senior director at Google, said the company had reached its “Hello World” milestone: “the first-ever AI response from a data center class TPU in orbit”. TPUs, or tensor processing units, are the chips Google designed to run AI workloads in its data centres.

The satellite was launched on 1 October. Google said that over the following weeks it completed a commissioning checklist, which included powering up the host and TPU trays and running early machine-learning tests.

During a ground-station pass, engineers sent a prompt to the open Gemma 4 model on board, asking it to write a haiku about being in space. Google said the reply was received as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway. It read: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.”

Google said it has since tested limericks and prompts that report the technical status of the payload. Its next step is a series of tests on how the TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation in orbit. The company said this would pave the way for its next milestone, a pair of interconnected satellites planned for 2027.

Project Suncatcher is a long-term Google research effort exploring whether AI computing could be powered in space.