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

Google Suncatcher’sprototype space data center is online and communicating with the ground after launching earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The satellite, which carries a single Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, is intended to pave the way for future networks of close-flying satellites performing large inference workloads in orbit. However, the power demands of the TPU mean it can only turn on for about twenty minutes at a time, complicating the already tricky business of space-to-ground communications.

After a commissioning process that tested out the satellite’s subsystems over about three weeks, the spacecraft was ready to work. When engineers on the ground sent their first prompt this week, they asked the model pre-loaded onto the satellite, Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4, to write a haiku about being in space. And thus:

Blue marble...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to techcrunch.com. To see the full text click HERE