TURIN: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centres will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years.
He stated that continuously available solar energy means these orbital facilities will eventually outperform their terrestrial counterparts.
Speaking at the Italian Tech Week in Turin, Bezos also compared the surge in artificial intelligence to the internet boom of the early 2000s.
He urged optimism about AI’s long-term benefits despite the risk of speculative bubbles forming.
The concept of orbital data centres has gained traction as Earth-based facilities drive up demand for electricity and water for server cooling.
“These giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7,“ Bezos said in a public conversation with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann.
He added that there are no clouds, no rain, and no weather to interfere with solar collection in space.
“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centres in space in the next couple of decades,“ he confirmed.
Bezos explained that the shift to space infrastructure is part of a broader trend of using space to improve life on Earth.
“It’s already happened with weather and communication satellites,“ he said.
“The next step is data centres, then other kinds of manufacturing.”
Hosting data centres in space presents its own set of significant challenges.
These include the difficulty of performing maintenance and carrying out upgrades on the orbiting hardware.
The high cost of rocket launches and the risk that these launches may fail are also major hurdles.
The executive chair of Amazon said the current AI wave shares traits with the dot-com era.
He noted that massive hype during the internet boom was followed by a market crash.
“We should be extremely optimistic that the societal and beneficial consequences of AI, like we had with internet 25 years ago, are for real and there to stay,“ he said.
“It is important to decorrelate the potential bubbles and their bursting consequences that might or might not happen from the actual reality.”
Bezos added that the benefits of AI are expected “to be broadly diffused and it will go everywhere”. – Reuters