Google’s October 1, 2026 launch of a refrigerator-sized satellite carrying four Trillium TPUs under Project Suncatcher represents the most recent concrete step toward orbital AI compute, testing radiation tolerance, vacuum cooling, and basic operations in low Earth orbit via a SpaceX rideshare. Earlier milestones include Starcloud’s 2025 flight of a single Nvidia H100 that trained a small language model in orbit, plus announced plans for larger Nvidia-based payloads and FCC filings for thousands of satellites. Academic work on passive solar-powered tethered designs and partnerships like SpaceX-Nvidia’s AI1 satellite concept add momentum. However, scaling to the market’s threshold of at least 100 data-center-grade accelerators while solving heat dissipation, inter-satellite laser links, launch economics, and reliability remains a multi-year engineering effort, with Google’s next two test satellites slated only for 2027.