Google's Project Suncatcher will put four AI chips in orbit on 1 October

Google is about to find out whether its AI chips can survive, and work, in space.

The first satellite from Project Suncatcher, Google’s research effort to run machine learning in orbit, is scheduled to launch on 1 October aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, according to SiliconANGLE and Android Headlines.

The ‘MVP’ satellite

The prototype is called MVP, and it is roughly the size of a refrigerator. Inside are four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the custom accelerators Google uses on the ground to train and run its AI models.

The satellite is designed to operate for about a year in low Earth orbit. Its job is to answer basic questions: do the chips keep working under radiation, how well can they be cooled, and can they run real AI workloads reliably from orbit?

Why put a data centre in space?

Energy. AI data centres consume enormous amounts of electricity, and power is fast becoming the main limit on how much compute companies can build.

In the right orbit, solar panels get nearly continuous sunlight, with no night and no clouds. Reports put the potential at up to eight times more solar energy than comparable panels on the ground. Google’s pitch is that, eventually, that free and constant energy could lower the cost of training and running AI.

The longer plan

Google is working with Planet Labs, which builds and operates satellites. The partnership envisions two satellites launching by early 2027, and, far further out, large clusters of satellites flying in tight formation and connected by laser links, according to DatacenterDynamics.

The hard parts

There are big unanswered questions: radiation damage to chips, getting rid of heat in a vacuum, the cost of launches, repairs that are impossible once hardware is in orbit, and moving huge volumes of data to and from the ground. MVP will not solve those problems. It is the first real data point.

Read our explainer: Why tech companies want to put data centres in space.