{"id":647221,"date":"2026-10-31T20:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T20:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/647221\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T20:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T20:46:11","slug":"googles-ai-satellite-sends-a-very-expensive-haiku-to-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/647221\/","title":{"rendered":"Google’s AI satellite sends a very expensive haiku to Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n ai and ml\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n Experimental orbital datacenter prototype puts its TPU to work producing poetry\n <\/p>\n

Google on Friday celebrated receiving a poem from its first experimental orbital AI datacenter satellite.<\/p>\n

The company’s Suncatcher satellite, launched at the start of the month<\/a> and put into low Earth orbit, has responded to a ground station prompt to “Write a haiku from the perspective of a TPU orbiting Earth, with the wonderful world spinning beneath you.”<\/p>\n

Travis Beals, senior director of Google’s interdisciplinary Paradigms of Intelligence<\/a> research team, said that with Suncatcher’s host and TPU trays powered up and machine learning tests completed, the onboard Gemma 4 model achieved its “Hello World” milestone by sending an inference response from orbit.<\/p>\n

“During a ground-station pass, we uplinked our first prompt to our onboard Gemma 4 open model, asking it to generate a haiku about being in space,” wrote Beals in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway, the orbiting AI model responded over the downlink:<\/p>\n

Blue marble below,<\/p>\n

Data streams in silent grace,<\/p>\n

Starlight feeds my core. \u2728<\/p>\n

Those roughly 20 tokens would cost about $0.000012 if generated through the Google Cloud API, based on Gemma 4 26B’s pricing<\/a> of $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, excluding input costs.<\/p>\n

Add in a satellite weighing perhaps 500 kg, based on the mass of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and a retail launch price of around $7,000 per kg, and you have a very expensive haiku.<\/p>\n

According to Google’s calculations<\/a>, if the cost of getting a satellite into low Earth orbit can be brought down to $200\/kg, the launch cost amortized over the satellite’s useful life (~$810\u20137,500\/kW\/year) could be comparable to current electricity spending for terrestrial datacenters in the US (~$570\u20133,000\/kW\/year).<\/p>\n

Google predicts that SpaceX could achieve that by 2035, more or less, and considers it strategically beneficial to prototype well in advance of that actually happening.<\/p>\n

After the haiku, Beals said, “we tested space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts reporting the technical status of the payload systems.” Next up: tests for evaluating how TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation.<\/p>\n

Google has already done some laboratory testing of its Trillium Cloud TPU and AMD host server to see how well they can withstand a 67 MeV proton beam.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The system’s high-bandwidth memory shows the most sensitivity in terms of the total ionizing dose \u2013 it exhibits irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2 krad(Si), which is about 3\u00d7 Google’s minimum requirement for TID survival of 750 rad(Si).<\/p>\n

“For typical transformer workloads, the observed SDC [silent data corruption] rate of approximately one event\/17 rad, at an estimated orbital dose of 150 rad(Si)\/year, translates to a very low failure probability on the order of 1 per 3 million inferences, assuming 1 inference per second,” Google researchers said in a paper<\/a> published earlier this month. <\/p>\n

“While this error rate is likely acceptable for inference, the impact of SEEs on training jobs, and the efficacy of system-level mitigations, requires further study.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, the study will continue. Next year, the plan is to test a pair of interconnected satellites. Rather than lofting large satellites into orbit, Google anticipates sending a constellation of many smaller satellites that communicate with one another. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ai and ml Experimental orbital datacenter prototype puts its TPU to work producing poetry Google on Friday celebrated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-647221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}