Google's orbiting TPU answers its first prompt — with a haiku

Google Research outlined Project Suncatcher in November 2025: a long-term research effort to test whether solar-powered satellites carrying its TPU chips could run machine-learning workloads in orbit.

Google describes the project as a long-term research moonshot to explore powering AI compute in space, and calls the October 1 launch its first step.

The prototype satellite launched on October 1 aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, from Vandenberg, California; SpaceX says the flight carried 130 payloads. Google says the satellite was built in partnership with Planet, the satellite-imaging company. The next few weeks were commissioning: powering up the host computer and the trays holding the TPUs, and running early machine-learning tests, Google says.

The satellite carries four TPUs and generates up to 1 kilowatt of electricity, but the TPU's power demands mean only one can be turned on at a time, for about 20 minutes, TechCrunch reports, which it says complicates space-to-ground communications. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch the satellite was operating nominally.

During a ground-station pass, Google's team uplinked a prompt to the Gemma 4 open model already loaded on the satellite, asking it to write a haiku about being in space. As the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway, the answer came back down: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.” Google, which announced the result on October 30 and said it happened that week, calls it the “Hello World” milestone: “the first-ever AI response from a data center class TPU in orbit.”

The team then tried space-themed limericks and prompts asking the satellite to report the technical status of its own systems. Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted about the result the same day, calling it “A ‘hello world’ milestone for Project Suncatcher” and writing that the team had “sent a command up to orbit, booted up the TPU, ran the prompt, and received our first complete response back on earth.”

Google says it will now run a series of tests on how the TPUs hold up under thermal stress and radiation exposure in orbit. Radiation can flip bits in memory and corrupt data without triggering typical monitoring tools, TechCrunch reports, adding that Google's ground testing suggested the impact would be minimal for inference and more of a problem for training.

Google says verifying that the TPUs can reliably run workloads in space paves the way for its next milestone, twin interconnected satellites in 2027. Google's post describes a research test and gives no figures for speed or cost.