Google launches its first Project Suncatcher satellite on October 1 with four TPUs on about 1kW of solar, roughly one data center server's worth of compute. It can show whether the chips stay cool in orbit, but the laser links any capacity case needs wait for a two-satellite test in 2027.
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Google's MVP satellite takes four TPUs and about 1 kW of solar power into orbit to test whether AI chips survive radiation and shed their own heat. Its results will show whether rebooting away bit flips and cooling through a radiator can carry into the constellations Google has already sketched.
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The orbital compute startup added an extension to its Series A largely to buy launch capacity before Falcon 9 retires in 2028, according to CEO Philip Johnston.
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Google flies one server's worth of TPUs on 1 kilowatt of solar power on Oct. 1, its first hardware test for orbital AI data centers. The flight tests chip survival and cooling while SpaceX's and Blue Origin's far larger constellations still wait on FCC review.
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About €20bn and 51 deals were announced at the Paris space summit, on top of an ESA budget member states had already approved. The dates suppliers will be judged against came from Macron's address, not from a contract.
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The nonprofit's founders also run Starcloud, and no one now alive can check the arrival, so the auditable claim is whether a 100-to-200-kilogram spacecraft and a launch contract exist by 2029, and what that kilogram of payload turns out to be.
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The $2.3B valuation sits on 25 people. The binding constraint is manifest space, and Starcloud-3 is designed around a vehicle its founder expects to reach commercially in 2028 or 2029.
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Google's Gemma milestone arrives with an engineer's caveat and no breakdown. Alibaba's rival claim of 3bn Qwen downloads is about 1.5 times what Hugging Face independently counted.
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Local opposition has hardened into a siting constraint that relocates capacity rather than stopping it. The replacement sites carry worse latency, harder repair access, and pilot-stage scale.
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SpaceX, Blue Origin, Google and Starcloud have filings out for well over a million compute satellites. The deadline is a sales pitch; the paperwork is a read on ground power and permitting.
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