Google and SpaceX have deepened collaboration through a roughly $30 billion terrestrial GPU rental agreement and Google’s Project Suncatcher, which launched its first TPU-equipped prototype satellite aboard a SpaceX rocket on October 1, 2026, to test radiation tolerance, thermal performance, and basic AI inference in orbit. Reports confirm ongoing discussions about orbital data centers, yet no binding agreement exists for operational space-based infrastructure, with major barriers including launch economics, radiation hardening, heat dissipation in vacuum, and laser-based inter-satellite links still unproven at scale. SpaceX targets initial supercompute deployments as early as 2027, while Google plans two additional test satellites next year; traders weigh these milestones against typical multi-year timelines for such complex hardware validation.