By John Ruwitch
Publication Date: 2026-10-01 18:41:00
A prototype of the Project Suncatcher satellite at the Planet Labs facility in San Francisco, California.
Planet Labs PBC
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Planet Labs PBC
Google just put a refrigerator-sized satellite into space, part of a research project the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun.
The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed in data centers on Earth. The…
/https:/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/1a/e7/1ae729d1-7a37-4650-b971-dfdb66c8f7a8/eo_pe_iss062e117852_sm.webp?ssl=1 "Google Wants to Send Data Centers to Space—and Just Launched a Satellite to Test Whether Its Ambitious Plan Will Work")
