Google’s A.I. Chips Head to Orbit on SpaceX, a Company It Partly Owns
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 3 sources
Google’s sending its AI chips to space on a SpaceX rocket. That’s awkward: it’s betting on a rival it partly owns.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Google is about to test whether its AI chips can survive life off Earth, and the ride is coming from SpaceX. Under Project Suncatcher, the company says its first satellite with Google-built AI chips will launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission, according to a blog post.
The prototype satellite was built with Planet, the Earth-imaging company, and carries Google’s Trillium tensor processing units. These are the same chips that already power models like Gemini on the ground. In orbit, they’ll have to handle a brutal launch, radiation from solar storms and cosmic rays, and the simple problem of getting rid of heat when there’s no air to help cool anything.
Google says the chips survived radiation testing at UC Davis’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at doses beyond what a five-year mission would require. The company’s next checkpoint is 2027, when it plans to send up two satellites to test whether TPU clusters can be linked with high-bandwidth lasers. If that works, future systems would carry dozens of TPU chips and act as shared orbital compute for large AI workloads.
The pitch is obvious enough: space gets a lot of sun. Google says low Earth orbit can provide up to eight times more solar power than Earth-based installations because there are no clouds, no night and no atmosphere in the way. That sounds attractive right as terrestrial data centers run into power bottlenecks, from Oracle’s force majeure declaration on its Stargate site in New Mexico to protests over new data centers in several countries.
But the economics are still ugly. The Next Web says launch costs would need to fall to about $200 per kilogram for orbital data centers to compete with those on Earth. And there’s a catch Google can’t dodge: SpaceX is both the cheapest path to orbit and a direct rival, with its own plans for satellite-based compute. Google has held a stake in SpaceX since 2015, so it gets to pay a competitor while also owning a piece of the company sending the chips up there.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic AI-era doublethink: every company wants to flee Earth’s power limits, and then ends up doing business with the very gatekeeper it complains about. SpaceX has turned orbital computing into a toll road, and Google is just another customer with better branding. The real test isn’t the chip. It’s whether anyone can make space computing cheaper than a very expensive science project.
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