Google thinks SpaceX’s Starship has to launch 1,600 times before space data centers get off the ground

Google’s prototype of its orbital compute satellite took off today onboard a SpaceX rocket launched from California — the first time the tech giant has sent one of its advanced chips into space.

Built by Planet Labs, the satellite will prove that a Google Tensor Processing Unit, its competitor to Nvidia’s GPUs, can function in space. That means supplying a kilowatt of continuous power, cooling the chip, and running a series of models through their paces to see if anything…