Google’s first data center satellite is online and writing poetry

Google's first data center satellite, Suncatcher, is online and operational, and is using a Google DeepMind Gemma 4 model to write poetry, including a haiku about being in space. The satellite has four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, but can only run one TPU for about 20 minutes at a time due to power demands. The satellite is currently undergoing testing to examine how the TPU performs under thermal stress and in the space radiation environment, which can cause bit flips and corrupt data. The test campaign will also involve the satellite reporting on its orbital conditions and testing the model's ability to perform inference workloads in space.