Google's Project Suncatcher boots TPU in orbit, runs Gemma, beams back a haiku
OlivierBachem · x · 2026-10-31
Sundar Pichai announced a 'hello world' milestone for Project Suncatcher: the prototype satellite launched weeks ago accepted an uplink command, booted its TPU in orbit, ran a prompt, and returned the first complete response — a haiku — to Earth. DeepMind researchers added three wild engineering details: Gemma 4 ran fully offline in low Earth orbit with zero ground compute relay, on 4 radiation-tested Trillium TPUs powered directly by solar energy, surviving launch vibration and thermal extremes — the same architecture designed to maximize capability-per-watt, now scaling from local devices to an orbiting satellite.
Related event: Google's Project Suncatcher runs first in-orbit TPU inference(16 posts)→
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