Google’s first orbital AI-chip test is in space and Google has confirmed contact; it is operating as expected.

launched 1 October 2026 on SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-18 from Vandenberg, California.

Four Trillium TPUs (Google Cloud TPU v6e), roughly the compute of one data-center server / a small TPU slice.

Workloads are Gemini inference, in bursts of about 15 minutes, then shutdown so the radiators can catch up. Continuous operation is not possible on this prototype.

Cooling cannot use air or fans. Heat moves through thermal interface material into aluminum/copper heat pipes, then radiators that dump infrared into space.

> Launch loads: the stack sees sustained acceleration around 10g (10 times normal Earth gravity);
individual components can see 50–100g.

Dawn-dusk sun-synchronous low Earth orbit, so the panels see near-continuous sunlight. In that orbit, space solar can deliver up to about 8× the energy of an equivalent ground panel (no atmosphere, weather, or night).

Google supplied the compute. About refrigerator-sized. Planned life about one year; designed to deorbit within roughly six years.

the original plan was two purpose-built satellites in 2027. Google put chips on an existing Planet bus to fly this year.

Radiation: proton-beam tests at UC Davis. Trillium showed no hard failures up to 15 krad(Si). HBM was the weak point, with irregularities after about 2 krad(Si), versus a shielded five-year dose requirement of about 750 rad(Si). Real risk in orbit is single-event bit flips from cosmic rays and solar particles, not just total dose.

2027: two satellites to test high-bandwidth laser links between them.

Long-term design is tight formations, not lone satellites. A research paper models an 81-satellite cluster inside about a 1 km radius, using free-space optical links. A bench demo has already done 800 Gbps each way on one transceiver pair. Close formation is required because optical power falls with distance squared.

Future craft would carry dozens of TPUs each. Radiators and solar arrays would dwarf the chips — analysts have said radiators could approach airliner scale.

> Scale claim from the program: on the order of 10,000 satellites for a 1 GW orbital cluster. BCG estimates today’s build-and-launch cost for that equivalent at about $30 billion. Earth still wins on cost; Google’s bet is launch-cost decline eventually closes the gap.
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