Google's Suncatcher AI satellite prototype reaches orbit

I remember the first meeting where the team pitched the idea of putting compute in space - exciting idea! Today's successful launch with our partner @planet prototype satellite shows how far we've come...and how far there is to go. Thanks for the lift, @SpaceX, another spectacular booster landing too🚀

Google just launched four of its AI chips into orbit on a Falcon 9, and the whole project hinges on one number buried in its own research paper. At $200 per kilogram to low Earth orbit, launching a data center starts to cost about the same as powering one on Earth. That math sounds crazy until you see what terrestrial data centers actually pay. $570 to $3,000 per kilowatt per year for electricity, plus years stuck in grid interconnection queues before a single server turns on. The satellite that went up today flies a dawn-dusk orbit where its panels almost never see shade, generating up to 8x what the same panel produces on the ground. The sun becomes a power plant nobody has to build. The chip decision is the part worth studying. This satellite carries stock Trillium TPUs, the same…

Project Suncatcher has liftoff! ☀️🚀 Announced last year, this moonshot project explores if we can one day host machine learning infrastructure in space. After years of research, we’ve just launched a prototype satellite, built in partnership with @planet, into orbit on @SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission. This initial mission will gather data on how @Google TPUs handle the physical stress and extremes of spaceflight. Ultimately, these findings will help us explore how to potentially link multiple satellite constellations for scaled machine learning. By operating in low Earth orbit, these systems can tap into near-constant sunlight to generate up to 8x more solar power than on Earth.