Google just put its AI chips in a rocket.
Project Suncatcher is testing whether space can host AI compute at scale.
Read that again.
One of the world's largest hyperscalers is looking past its own data centers because centralized compute, even at Google's scale, has a limit.
The bottleneck was never just chips.
It's who controls that.
Decentralized compute solves this problem today.
Without a rocket.
We’re sending TPUs to space (yes, really).
After years of research, we’re launching a satellite to evaluate if and how Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) hold up in orbit.
The test mission, as part of our latest moonshot — Project Suncatcher — is designed to gather data exploring how we can one day host machine learning infrastructure in space.
$GOOGL is launching its first Project Suncatcher AI satellite on Oct. 1 with four TPUs onboard to test running Gemini from orbit.
Google is already planning more launches in 2027 and studying 80+ satellite fleets that could eventually function as orbital AI data centers.