NASA Puts Google’s Gemma Large Language Model in Orbit

Source: IEEE Spectrum AI·2026-07-23 21:00Publish time unverified

The viability of orbital data centers hosting the largest and most capable large language models (LLMs) remains hotly contested. But enormous deployments that require thousands of GPUs aren’t the only way LLMs might prove useful in space. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently sent Google’s Gemma 3 to space, achieving the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model analyzing imagery from a satellite’s own sensor.