Google put its own artificial intelligence chips into orbit Thursday, launching a refrigerator-sized test satellite designed to answer a question that would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago: Could the data centers powering AI one day run in space?
The satellite, which Google nicknamed MVP, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 11:32 a.m. PT aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission. It was one of 130 payloads on the flight, which carried everything from cubesats to orbital transfer vehicles.
The launch is the first in-orbit test for Project Suncatcher, a research effort Google announced in November 2025. Google is not the first to test AI hardware in space, but MVP is the first step by a major tech company toward building orbital data centers.
Inside are four of Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, the specialized chips the company builds to run AI. Together, they reportedly have about the computing power of one server in a data center. The satellite will answer simple AI queries using Google’s Gemini and operate for about a year. It could keep circling Earth for up to six years before gravity pulls it down and it burns up in the atmosphere.
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The pitch for orbital data centers comes down to power. In low Earth orbit, satellites get near-constant sunlight and can generate up to eight times more solar power than panels on the ground, according to Google.
That matters as AI’s appetite for electricity keeps growing and data centers on the ground run into resistance, as rural communities across the U.S. are fighting to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Many of those facilities also strain local water supplies, using cooling towers that shed heat by evaporating water.
Google framed the mission around a basic question: “Can our AI hardware operate in space?”
The first hurdle was getting there. Google says the roughly 10-minute ride to low Earth orbit puts loads of up to 10 times the force of gravity on a spacecraft. Before launch, engineers shook the satellite on all three axes to mimic a rocket’s vibrations, and the hardware held.
Radiation is the next threat. Solar events and cosmic rays can cause “bit flips,” errors that switch a chip’s binary code. Starting in February 2025, Google took its chips to UC Davis’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, where a particle accelerator called a cyclotron blasted them with a radiation dose equal to five years in space. Restarting the chips could usually reset the bit flips.
Then there’s heat. On Earth, fans, air and water carry heat away from hot chips. In the vacuum of space, heat can only be shed through radiators. Google built a layered system: the chips sit on a motherboard, a putty-like thermal material draws heat into aluminum and copper layers, and a radiator panel projects it into space.
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Even so, MVP’s chips can’t run nonstop. Travis Beals, Google’s senior director for Project Suncatcher, told the New York Times they can operate for about 15 minutes before shutting down to cool off.
“This first launch is about seeing what works, identifying points of failure, and applying those findings to future missions,” Beals wrote in Google’s announcement.
Google has plenty of company. SpaceX, which gave MVP its ride, has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for up to 1 million orbital data center satellites, according to Data Center Dynamics, and the idea helped fuel SpaceX’s record IPO earlier this year. Startup Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit in November 2025 and trained a small AI model there. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said gigawatt-scale data centers will be in space within 10 or more years, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also backed the concept.