Google's orbiting TPUs just ran Gemma 4 and wrote a space haiku

Google's first Project Suncatcher prototype has answered from orbit. Engineers uplinked a prompt, booted a TPU and ran the open Gemma 4 model on board, asking it for a haiku about being in space. The poem came back as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway. Sundar Pichai called it a "hello world" milestone. The team has since tried space-themed limericks and prompts that report on payload status.

This isn't a data center in space yet. The fridge-sized satellite, built with Planet, launched on October 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare and carries four TPUs. Heat limits the chips to about 15 minutes of Gemma at a time, and project lead Travis Beals calls the mission "a very minimal test." The harder work comes next: finding out how the TPUs hold up under thermal stress and radiation, with about a year of operation as the goal.

If that goes well, Google plans two interconnected satellites in 2027 to test links between them. It also has company in orbit. Starcloud flew an Nvidia H100 last November, and SpaceX says orbital AI compute satellites could deploy as early as 2028. Even so, Beals says space data centers won't be cheaper within five years and won't replace Earth-based ones anytime soon.

Why it matters: AI's power demand is pushing Big Tech to test orbit as an energy source, but a haiku proves the chips boot, not that the economics work.