At a lab in San Francisco last month, a team of technicians in protective suits and hairnets poked, prodded and inspected a refrigerator-size satellite commissioned by Google. First, they examined the satellite’s solar panels, which would unfurl in space and face the sun. The satellite was then placed on a table and shaken rapidly in a vibration test, to see whether the chips inside would be damaged or the machine would come apart during a journey into space.

The technicians painstakingly painted a small line over each screw to help indicate any loosening during the shaking. The satellite passed the vibration test, with its screws staying put and the chips remaining intact. James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president for research, called the results “great,” but he said he still wondered what would happen when the satellite went to space.

The work was part of an ambitious effort from Google called Project Suncatcher, which aims to put artificial intelligence data centers into space and to harness the sun’s energy to power them. On Oct. 1, the satellite from the San Francisco lab — which Google has named MVP — is set to become the first step toward that goal by a major tech company. It will be loaded onto a Space X Falcon 9 rocket at the Vandenberg Space Force Base near Santa Barbara, Calif., and then launched into orbit.

Google provided The New York Times with the first inside look at the project, which seemed like a science-fiction dream just a year ago. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and others have pledged support for orbital data centers, but the idea faces many challenges, including withstanding radiation in space and the costs of getting machines beyond the atmosphere. Yet as data centers grapple with terrestrial opposition and physical limits, having computing facilities float above Earth has become increasingly attractive.

To be clear, Google is not sending up a full data center — only an experimental precursor to one. MVP contains four specialized computer chips called “tensor processing units,” which have the computing power of one server in a data center. The satellite’s solar panels will supply only about one kilowatt of power — roughly the amount needed to run a hair dryer — to the chips.

But that will be enough for Google to test its hardware against the harsh conditions of space. The satellite will answer simple A. I. queries and operate for a year, though it is set to circle Earth for up to six years.

Eventually, it is expected to succumb to Earth’s gravitational pull and burn up as it descends through the atmosphere. Mr. Manyika said Google’s expectations for the satellite were tempered.