According to CNBC, Alphabet plans to launch its homegrown AI chips into orbit on Thursday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of an effort to make data centers in space a reality. The launch is scheduled for 11:15 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California's Santa Barbara County, and the mission will carry a solar-powered prototype equipped with Google's tensor processing units as part of SpaceX's Transporter-18 flight.

The launch will be the first in-orbit test for Alphabet's Project Suncatcher, which Google first revealed in November 2025. Alphabet said the project is aimed at exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure, and it noted that satellites in low Earth orbit can access near-constant sunlight and generate up to eight times more solar power than on Earth. The company said it has already tested its TPUs running AI workloads at the University of California at Davis, but does not yet know how the chips will perform in low Earth orbit.

Alphabet is a significant investor in SpaceX, with its stake currently valued at over $82 billion. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has also said it plans to build and launch its own orbital data centers, while Musk has said space-based data centers would be the cheapest way to train AI within two years, maybe three at the latest. SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said at an event in September that the company will deploy supercompute in space in 2027.