The push to build more AI capacity has mostly been a story about land, power lines and cooling on the ground. Google is now testing a different route: taking part of that infrastructure off the planet altogether.
The company's project is called "Suncatcher". The idea is to run AI computing in orbit and power it with solar energy rather than a terrestrial grid. It is an early-stage effort, and the first hardware is about to leave the ground.
A fridge-sized first step
According to The New York Times, Google's first experimental satellite, named "MVP", is scheduled to launch on 1 October. It will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Most people who have spoken to ElevenLabs have no idea they did. The company builds models that turn text into speech that sounds human, and much of that speech now reaches the public through customer service lines. Klarna uses it for first-line phone support covering 35 million U.S. customers. Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe and a growing number of governments are also customers. A separate part of the business serves creators, who use the platform for audiobooks, dubbing and music.
The company is four years old. It says it is pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue, and its backers reportedly value it at $22 billion. In a short on-stage interview with TechCrunch at Nrth, a Toronto entrepreneurship conference formerly called Elevate, co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski covered competition, model choice, disclosure and money.
Most of the attention in AI-assisted software development has gone to tools that write code faster. Lovable is making a different case: the thing people want at the end of the process is not code, but a working product.
The latest figures suggest that case is finding buyers. Speaking at the HumanX summit in Amsterdam on Thursday, co-founder Fabian Hedin said the vibe-coding platform has crossed $600 million in annual run-rate revenue. In June, the company had put the same figure at around $500 million. That means roughly $100 million was added in the space of a few months.
Most of the conversation around AI infrastructure is about capacity: more gigawatts, more campuses, more compute for the companies training frontier models. That makes sense on an investor slide. It is less helpful when a single site in New Mexico depends on a gas pipeline that has not yet been built.
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer behind Project Jupiter, a data centre campus in New Mexico that forms part of the Stargate initiative. Bloomberg first reported the move on Thursday. The notice does not mean Oracle is walking away. It does show how much of the AI build-out now rests on permits, pipelines and power supplies that no tech company fully controls.
Google DeepMind's new leader has a clear priority, and it is not artificial general intelligence. Koray Kavukcuoglu wants Gemini 4 out well before the end of the year. He has also made it plain that he sees little value in arguing over whether AGI has already arrived.
Kavukcuoglu made his first media appearance as head of Google DeepMind at The Information's AI Agenda Live Summit. There, he described Gemini 4 as being in an early phase of post-training, the stage where a base model is refined so that it behaves reliably. He said he hopes to release it considerably earlier than year-end.
CyrioX is financed by advertising. You can choose how you want to use this website:
With advertising: we load an advertising script from a third-party ad network. The ad network may set cookies, use your IP address and device information, and may process data outside the EU.
Ad-free for €0.99 per month: no advertising and no advertising tracking. Cancel at any time.
You can change your decision at any time via "Cookie Settings" at the bottom of every page.
