Alphabet launches AI chips into orbit via SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

Alphabet launched its homegrown AI chips into orbit on Thursday in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, a step towards making data centers in space a reality.

The launch window opened at 11:15 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California's Santa Barbara County, with liftoff occurring without incident. Just after noon local time, the spacecraft was rising with the payloads on board.

SpaceX has promoted supercomputers in space as the next frontier in artificial intelligence infrastructure, touting "infinite real estate" in orbit as a means of escaping the data center backlash on the ground. During the uncrewed Transporter-18 mission, SpaceX will carry Planet Labs satellites, including a solar-powered prototype equipped with Google's tensor processing units (TPUs).

The Thursday launch marks the first in-orbit test for Alphabet's Project Suncatcher, a "moonshot" initiative Google first revealed in November 2025. The company aims to develop reliable, solar-powered AI computing infrastructure that can operate continuously in space.

In a post announcing the launch plan, Alphabet said Project Suncatcher is a means of "exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure."

Alphabet is a significant investor in SpaceX, which went public in June in a record IPO, and the businesses are close partners even as their AI divisions compete with one another. Alphabet's stake in SpaceX is currently valued at over $82 billion.

In low Earth orbit, satellites can "access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth," Alphabet said in the post. Eventually, they expect to be able to "link together multiple constellations of satellites, allowing them to manage larger AI workloads while in orbit."

The Google parent has already tested its TPUs running AI workloads in a facility at the University of California at Davis, but doesn't yet know how its chips will perform in the challenging conditions of low Earth orbit.

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has also announced that it plans to build and launch its own orbital data centers. They will be comprised of swarms of satellites the company develops in Redmond, Washington, equipped with graphics processing units and solar arrays it plans to produce with Tesla , Musk's automaker.

Earlier this year, Musk said data centers in space would be the cheapest way to train AI, "and that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest." SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said at an event in September that the company will deploy "supercompute in space" in 2027.

Industry experts say space-based data centers represent a far-out mission, if they can even become feasible, in part because rocket launches remain capacity-constrained and expensive. Orbital data centers would also require cooling systems and chips that can withstand extreme temperatures, as well as protection from radiation. Clutter and orbital debris could also impede their viability.

The Transporter-18 flight will be the second potentially historic launch in a single day for SpaceX, which is is also carrying astronauts to the International Space Station from Florida's Space Coast for NASA on Thursday, marking the start of a six-month mission in orbit. Liftoff took place late morning.

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