Google’s first orbital AI writes a haiku as the data-center race moves to space

Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype, described as its first satellite data center, launched October 1 on a SpaceX rideshare in partnership with Planet and later ran DeepMind’s Gemma 4 model in orbit. About three weeks after launch, engineers asked the model to describe space, and it produced a three-line poem. The satellite carries four tensor processing units, but only one can operate at a time for roughly 20 minutes, generating up to 1 kilowatt of electricity. The test showed an AI model can function in orbit; commercial space data centers still face questions about cost, cooling, radiation and data transfer.