Overview
- Google announced Thursday that it will send a refrigerator‑sized prototype called MVP into low Earth orbit on Oct. 1 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter‑18 rideshare to collect real flight data.
- MVP carries four Trillium Tensor Processing Units that together match the power of one data‑center server and will run short Gemini queries while drawing roughly 1 kilowatt of solar power and operating for about a year.
- Engineers put the TPUs through heavy ground tests, including vibration and proton‑beam radiation trials at UC Davis’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, which Google says simulated and exceeded five years of typical orbital radiation exposure.
- The mission is explicitly a learning flight to measure how chips handle launch g‑forces, radiation‑induced errors and vacuum cooling limits—Google says the TPUs can run for roughly 15 minutes before radiators must cool them—and the company plans two follow‑on satellites in 2027 to test laser links.
- Commercial use remains years away because of hard engineering limits and high launch costs, with Google saying parity with Earth data centers would likely need launch prices near or below about $200 per kilogram by the mid‑2030s, a threshold that would reshape supply chains and site planning for terrestrial data centers.