Google's first data-center satellite is online and answered a prompt from the ground

Google's Suncatcher prototype, a space data center launched earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 with more than 100 other spacecraft, is online and talking to the ground, TechCrunch reported Friday. The satellite carries four Google tensor processing units and can generate up to a kilowatt of electricity. It is meant as a step toward networks of close-flying satellites that run large inference jobs in orbit. The TPUs draw so much power that only one can be on for about 20 minutes at a time.

After about three weeks of checkout, engineers sent a first prompt this week and asked Gemma 4, the model loaded on the satellite, to write a haiku. Google did not publish the poem in the TechCrunch account.