On 1 October, Google put four of its AI chips into orbit on a satellite about the size of a refrigerator. Two weeks later, Nvidia's CEO said his engineers are designing a new kind of server with SpaceX, meant to run in space. For software developers, the cloud they deploy to may one day include machines that are not on the ground at all. This post looks at what is real today, who gains from it, and what the next step looks like.

What is real comes first. In November 2025, a startup called Starcloud launched Starcloud-1, a satellite of about 60 kilograms carrying one Nvidia H100 GPU. It was the first data center class GPU to run in orbit, and the team used it to train a small language model in space [1] [2] . On 1 October 2026, Google's Project Suncatcher prototype followed with four TPUs.…