Google recently unveiled Project Suncatcher, a research “moonshot” aiming to build a data centre in space. The tech giant plans to use a constellation of solar-powered satellites which would run on its own TPU chips and transmit data to one another via lasers.
Google’s TPU chips (tensor processing units), which are specially designed for machine learning, are already powering Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3. Project Suncatcher will explore whether they can be adapted to survive radiation and temperature extremes and operate reliably in orbit. It aims to deploy two prototype satellites into low Earth orbit, some 400 miles above the Earth, in early 2027.
