Google’s Project Suncatcher to launch TPUs to space with Planet Labs in early 2027

Google plans to send TPU AI chips into space. The company will partner with Planet Labs on 'Project Suncatcher' to launch two satellites by early 2027 to explore the potential of larger-scale space data centre clusters.

Project Suncatcher

“Our TPUs are headed to space!” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

"Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges," he added.

"Early research shows our Trillium-generation TPUs (our tensor processing units, purpose-built for AI) survived without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate low-earth orbit levels of radiation. However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability."

As part of its research, Google published a pre-print paper on Project Suncatcher in which the company theorised "a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips."

The paper detailed the basics for a potential 81-satellite cluster of 1km radius, but admitted that significant technical and logistical hurdles still exist, and that the final scale could change.

This Sunday saw the launch of the Starcloud-1 satellite featuring an Nvidia H100, with startup Starcloud proposing to one day build a 5GW data centre across a 4km solar array.

"Proposals exist for 'monolithic' data centers in space where individual spacecraft significantly exceed the size of any current or planned launch vehicle," Google said in its paper, linking to Starcloud's whitepaper.

"While such design concepts reduce the need for high-performance inter-satellite links, they involve new challenges: such structures would have to be assembled in space by humans or robots; collision avoidance would be more cumbersome; and structural requirements would add mass and complexity."

Pichai said, “More testing and breakthroughs will be needed as we count down to launch two prototype satellites with @planet by early 2027, our next milestone of many. Excited for us to be a part of all the innovation happening in (this) space!”

Our TPUs are headed to space! 

Inspired by our history of moonshots, from quantum computing to autonomous driving, Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space, harnessing more of the sun’s power (which emits more power than 100… pic.twitter.com/aQhukBAMDp

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) November 4, 2025

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