GoKawiil
Tech News
Google confirmed in a blog post that it successfully activated the Tensor Processing Units aboard a satellite launched earlier this month, running its Gemma 4 model to produce a space-themed haiku and other test prompts. The milestone is part of Project Suncatcher, Google's experimental effort to explore running AI compute hardware in orbit.
Alphabet announced that Oracle will offer Google's tensor processing units through its own data centers, marking the first time the custom AI chips are available outside Google's own infrastructure. The move extends a shift that began last quarter when Google opened TPUs to outside data centers, and comes a day before Alphabet's third-quarter earnings report.
An excerpt from Kevin Roose's upcoming book The AGI Chronicles describes a contentious May 2022 dinner between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over Anthropic's chip needs. The book alleges Huang called Anthropic's compute chief a 'bean counter' after being shown data favoring Google's TPUs, and that Amodei later described Huang as 'kind of Trump-like' for repeating himself. Nvidia disputes the 'bean counter' remark, and despite the rocky start, the two companies eventually formed a partnership.
Google will launch a prototype satellite carrying its Tensor Processing Units next week as part of Project Suncatcher, a research effort into running AI computing clusters in space. The satellite, launching with Planet Labs aboard a SpaceX Transporter-18 mission, will test how the chips withstand launch forces, radiation and temperature extremes, along with a heat-pipe cooling system suited for vacuum conditions.
Google plans to launch a satellite called MVP on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1, carrying four tensor processing units powered by roughly one kilowatt of solar energy. The satellite will process simple AI queries for a year as part of Project Suncatcher, an early-stage effort to test whether AI computing hardware can withstand orbital conditions, and will remain in orbit for six years before burning up on reentry.
Google will launch a prototype satellite to test how its Tensor Processing Units perform in orbit, part of Project Suncatcher, a research effort first announced last year. The initiative explores whether satellites in low Earth orbit, which can access near-constant sunlight and generate far more solar power than on Earth, could eventually host machine learning infrastructure.