The refrigerator-sized satellite carrying Google’s AI chips launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
A refrigerator-sized prototype satellite carrying four of the company’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) lifted off on Thursday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg, California. It projects launch prices could fall to about $200 (roughly Rs 17,700) per kilogram by 2035. Getting there would take SpaceX’s Starship about 1,800 flights over a decade, each carrying 200 tonnes.
“I remember the first meeting where the team pitched the idea of putting compute in space – exciting idea!” he wrote, adding that the successful launch with Planet “shows how far we’ve come…and how far there is to go. Google has sent its AI chips to space for the first time. The launch marks the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, Google’s long-term effort to find out whether AI data centres could one day run in space. Google CEO Sundar Pichai marked the moment on X. He also thanked SpaceX for the lift and pointed to “another spectacular booster landing. That idea is gaining traction as AI’s electricity demands climb and data centre projects on Earth face growing local opposition. Startup Starcloud flew an Nvidia H100 chip into orbit last November, and SpaceX is building its own orbital compute satellites. Before launch, Google blasted its Trillium TPUs with a proton beam at UC Davis’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory. The chips survived a radiation dose higher than a five-year mission would deliver. Google did have to redo the tests after finding its setup offered more shielding than space would. The repeat run threw up slightly more logic errors, which Beals pegged at roughly one in a million for typical inference. That works for answering queries, but becomes a problem for months-long training runs spread across thousands of chips. Cooling is the tougher puzzle. With no air in space, heat can only escape through radiators. Google pairs heat pipes with radiators, and those radiators are among the heaviest parts on board, which pushes launch costs up. A peer-reviewed Google paper, due in the journal Joule, shows why. Starship has never flown more than five times in a single year.
