Google’s AI Satellite Sends Its First Haiku From Orbit

The satellite, carrying one Google Tensor Processing Unit and generating up to one kilowatt of electricity, was built to test whether AI computing could be done in orbit. Its first prompt asked the onboard Gemma 4 model to compose a haiku about space. Google also tested limericks and prompts requesting information about conditions around the spacecraft.

After roughly three weeks of commissioning checks, engineers began using the satellite. The TPU’s power needs limit it to about 20 minutes of operation at a time, making communications with Earth more challenging.

Google’s next tests will assess how the processors handle temperature extremes and radiation in orbit. Radiation can alter stored computer data, potentially causing errors that ordinary monitoring may not detect. Earlier ground tests indicated that radiation could pose less of a problem for inference—the process of running a trained model—than for training one. The orbital tests will let the team examine the effects directly.

Google plans to use the results to prepare for a 2027 demonstration involving two more satellites with higher power generation and optical links between them. The company sees the project as an early step toward networks of satellites capable of handling larger AI workloads together.