Google's Orbital TPUs Run Gemma 4 and Write a Space Haiku

Google says it has successfully tested its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) in Earth orbit. The Gemma 4 AI model, running on chips installed on a satellite, received a prompt for the first time and generated a reply.

Engineers powered up the onboard TPUs and asked Gemma 4 to compose a haiku about being in space. The model answered with three lines: "Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core."

Beyond poetry

Google also tried the model on other space-themed requests, including limericks, the five-line humorous poems, and the processing of telemetry data.

The test is part of Project Suncatcher, an experimental Google initiative to build infrastructure for AI computing directly in orbit. The satellite carrying the TPUs launched earlier in October.

What comes next

The harder questions are still ahead. Google now has to check how reliably the processors perform in unfamiliar conditions, notably under thermal stress and radiation. The company says the next round of tests will focus on those factors.

If they go well, the next step is the launch of two interconnected satellites, planned for 2027. Google expects the results to help it judge whether orbital data centers for AI are a realistic prospect.

For now the demonstration is modest: a short poem rather than a large workload. But it shows that the company's AI hardware can boot and run a modern language model outside the planet's atmosphere, which is the first hurdle for any off-world computing plan.