By Will McCurdy
Publication Date: 2026-10-31 12:52:00
Google has just hit a big milestone in its “moonshot” project to put functional solar-powered data centers in space. The tech giant has now received its first-ever AI response from one of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips launched into low Earth orbit.
During a ground-station pass, Google researchers prompted the company’s Gemma 4 open-source AI model, asking it to generate a haiku about being in space. As the satellite passed by Svalbard, Norway’s Arctic archipelago, it was able to beam back a short poem:
“Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core.”
The news comes after the first prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher launched on Oct. 1, in collaboration with satellite imaging company Planet, using SpaceX’s rideshare service.
Google says that proving its TPUs “can reliably execute workloads in space” paves the way for the next step in its plan of having twin interconnected satellites operational in 2027.
Google…
