Opposition to data centres is growing in many parts of the world. Google, however is trying to address this issue in an unconventional way by testing how a data centre might operate in space. The Alphabet-owned company announced on Thursday that Project Suncatcher, which has been in the research and development stage for several years, had been launched into space "aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX". A video shared by the technology giant showed various employees applauding as the launch which took place on Thursday. Google says the purpose of Project Suncatcher is to explore “whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure” necessary to fuel the AI boom. Up, up, and away. 🚀Today, in partnership with @planet, we launched a prototype satellite carrying four TPUs into orbit on @SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission. This launch is the first step of Project Suncatcher, our long-term research moonshot to see whether we can one… pic.twitter.com/6WakAX8q7N— Google (@Google) October 1, 2026Data centres are often criticised for their noise, size and intense energy needs, but setting at least some of them up in space could solve some problems. The company included its AI hardware to test that idea onboard the Transporter-18 SpaceX mission.The launch was successful, which will now make it possible for Google to test how well its techno...
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