A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Northrop Grumman Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) and Mission Expansion Pod (MEP) lifts off from Launch Complex 40 at the Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 21, 2026.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
alphabet The company plans to launch its own AI chip into orbit on Thursday. space x The Falcon 9 rocket is a step toward making data centers in space a reality.
The launch is scheduled for 11:15 a.m. Pacific Time from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California.
SpaceX is pushing space supercomputers as the next frontier in artificial intelligence infrastructure and touting “unlimited real estate” in orbit as a way to escape the backlash of ground-based data centers. During the unmanned transporter 18 mission, SpaceX planet lab This includes a solar-powered prototype powered by Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs).
This will be the first in-orbit test of Alphabet’s Project Suncatcher, a “moonshot” initiative that Google first unveiled in November 2025. The company aims to develop a 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 way to “explore whether it is possible to one day install scalable machine learning infrastructure in space.”
Alphabet is a key investor in SpaceX, which went public in a record IPO in June, and the two companies are close partners even though their AI sectors compete with each other. Alphabet’s SpaceX stock is currently valued at more than $82 billion.
In low-Earth orbit, the satellite “has access to near-constant sunlight and can generate up to eight times more solar power than on Earth,” Alphabet said in a post. Eventually, the company hopes to “link multiple constellations of satellites together to manage larger AI workloads in orbit.”
Google’s parent company is already testing TPUs running AI workloads at its UC Davis facility, but it remains to be seen how its chips will perform under the harsh conditions of low Earth orbit.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX also announced plans to build and launch its own orbital data center. They consist of a constellation of satellites the company is developing in Redmond, Wash., equipped with graphics processing equipment and solar arrays it plans to manufacture. teslaMusk’s car maker.
Earlier this year, Musk said data centers in space would be the cheapest way to train AI, saying, “That will happen within two years, three years at the latest.” SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said at an event in September that the company will deploy “supercomputing in space” in 2027.
Industry experts say space-based data centers, even if they become a reality, would be a far-flung mission. One reason for this is that rocket launches still have limited capacity and are expensive. In addition to protection from radiation, data centers in orbit also require cooling systems and chips that can withstand extreme temperatures. Clutter and orbital debris can also impede their survivability.
Transporter 18’s flight could be the second historic launch in a single day for SpaceX, which is scheduled to carry astronauts from Florida’s Space Coast to the International Space Station on Thursday for NASA, marking the beginning of a six-month mission in orbit.
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