A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Northrop Grumman’s Mission Robotic Automobile (MRV) and Mission Extension Pods (MEPs) launches from Area Pressure Station’s Launch Advanced 40 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 21, 2026.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Pictures
Alphabet launched its homegrown AI chips into orbit on Thursday in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, a step in direction of making information facilities in house a actuality.
The launch window opened at 11:15 am PT from Vandenberg Air Pressure Base in California’s Santa Barbara County, with liftoff occurring with out incident. SpaceX efficiently deployed all payloads on board by 1 p.m. native time.
SpaceX has promoted supercomputers in house as the following frontier in synthetic intelligence infrastructure, touting “infinite actual property” in orbit as a way of escaping the info middle backlash on the bottom. Through the uncrewed Transporter-18 mission, SpaceX will carry Planet Labs satellites, together with a solar-powered prototype outfitted with Google’s tensor processing models (TPUs).
The Thursday launch marks the primary in-orbit check for Alphabet’s Mission Suncatcher, a “moonshot” initiative Google first revealed in November 2025. The corporate goals to develop dependable, solar-powered AI computing infrastructure that may function constantly in house.
In a post saying the launch plan, Alphabet stated Mission Suncatcher is a way of “exploring whether or not house might sooner or later host scalable machine studying infrastructure.”
Alphabet is a big investor in SpaceX, which went public in June in a document IPO, and the companies are shut companions at the same time as their AI divisions compete with each other. Alphabet’s stake in SpaceX is at the moment valued at over $82 billion.
In low Earth orbit, satellites can “entry near-constant daylight, producing as much as eight occasions extra solar energy than on Earth,” Alphabet stated within the publish. Ultimately, they anticipate to have the ability to “hyperlink collectively a number of constellations of satellites, permitting them to handle bigger AI workloads whereas in orbit.”
The Google dad or mum has already examined its TPUs working AI workloads in a facility on the College of California at Davis, however does not but understand how its chips will carry out within the difficult circumstances of low Earth orbit.
SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has additionally introduced that it plans to construct and launch its personal orbital information facilities. They are going to be comprised of swarms of satellites the corporate develops in Redmond, Washington, outfitted with graphics processing models and photo voltaic arrays it plans to provide with Tesla, Musk’s automaker.
Earlier this yr, Musk stated information facilities in house could be the most affordable method to practice AI, “and that shall be true inside two years, perhaps three on the newest.” SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell stated at an occasion in September that the corporate will deploy “supercompute in house” in 2027.
Business consultants say space-based information facilities symbolize a far-out mission, if they will even turn into possible, partly as a result of rocket launches stay capacity-constrained and costly. Orbital information facilities would additionally require cooling techniques and chips that may face up to excessive temperatures, in addition to safety from radiation. Muddle and orbital particles might additionally impede their viability.
The Transporter-18 flight was the second main launch in a single day for SpaceX, which additionally started transporting astronauts to the Worldwide Area Station from Florida’s Area Coast for NASA with an earlier liftoff on Thursday, marking the beginning of a six-month mission in orbit.
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