Satellite and aerospace company
Appears in 3 stories · Last updated Nov 1, 2026
Built and helped operate the prototype spacecraft
On October 1, a Google prototype satellite rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 into low Earth orbit carrying four Tensor Processing Units, the chips Google builds for machine learning. After about three weeks of checking out its subsystems, the spacecraft took a prompt from the ground on October 30: a chip running Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model wrote a haiku about being in space, downlinked as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway.
Updated Nov 1
As of September 2026: Operates ~97 active satellites
Planet Labs posts the orbital position of every satellite it flies, 97 of them, in one open file anyone can download. The same company delays or withholds its imagery of Middle East conflicts. Both moves respond to one fact: satellite data shapes war.
Updated Sep 10
As of May 2026: Building GPU-native AI engine for satellite imagery with Nvidia
Earth observation satellites generate petabytes of imagery every day, but only about two percent of it ever reaches the ground. The bottleneck is physics: a satellite in low Earth orbit gets maybe ten minutes of ground-station contact per pass, and radio bandwidth cannot keep up with sensor resolution that doubles every few years. Nvidia's answer, announced at its annual developer conference on March 17, 2026, is to stop trying to move the data down and instead move the AI up. The Vera Rubin Space-1 Module packs 25 times the compute power of Nvidia's H100 chip into a radiation-hardened package designed to run large language models and foundation models directly in orbit.
Updated May 30
No stories match your search
Try a different keyword
How would you like to describe your experience with the app today?
