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Google has successfully run an artificial intelligence (AI) model on a satellite in orbit and received its first complete response back on Earth, marking a key milestone in its Project Suncatcher initiative to explore the possibility of running AI computing infrastructure in space.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the development in a post on X, describing it as a hello world milestone for Project Suncatcher. He said the team had sent a command to the satellite, booted up its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), run a prompt and received the response back on Earth. After launching our prototype satellite a few weeks ago, weve now successfully sent a command up to orbit, booted up the TPU, ran the prompt, and received our first complete response back on earth - a haiku! Pichai said. According to a blog post by Google, the prototype satellite was launched on October 1 as part of the company's long-term research effort to examine whether space could support scalable machine learning infrastructure. The company said the satellite completed its initial commissioning checks over the following weeks, including powering up its host and TPU trays and running early machine learning tests. During a ground-station pass, the team sent a prompt to the onboard Gemma 4 open model, asking it to generate a haiku about space. The response was received as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway. Google said it subsequently tested the system with space-themed limericks and prompts asking it to report the technical status of the satellite's systems. The next phase will involve testing how the TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation exposure in orbit. These tests are intended to establish whether the chips can reliably run computing workloads in the space environment. The company said successful testing would pave the way for its next milestone: two interconnected satellites in 2027. Project Suncatcher is exploring whether satellites could eventually be linked into constellations to handle larger AI workloads. Google has said satellites in low Earth orbit could access near-constant sunlight and potentially generate up to eight times more solar power than on Earth. The latest milestone follows Google's announcement of the project, when it said the initial satellite mission would test whether its TPUs could survive and operate in space. (ANI)
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