TURIN, ITALY
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos boldly predicted on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centres will be constructed in space within the next 10 to 20 years. He argued that the continuous, unimpeded availability of solar energy in orbit would eventually allow these extraterrestrial facilities to outperform and undercut the costs of their Earth-based counterparts.
Speaking at the Italian Tech Week in Turin, Bezos drew parallels between the current surge in artificial intelligence (AI) development and the internet boom of the early 2000s, urging optimism despite the inherent risk of speculative bubbles.
The concept of orbital data centres has gained significant traction as massive data centres on Earth increasingly strain local resources, driving up demand for electricity and prodigious amounts of water for server cooling.
In a public conversation with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann, Bezos elaborated on the space advantage: “These giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7. There are no clouds and no rain, no weather.” He confidently asserted, “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centres in space in the next couple of decades.”
Bezos framed the migration of infrastructure into space as part of a broader, sustained trend of leveraging space technology to improve life on Earth. “It’s already happened with weather and communication satellites,” he noted. “The next step is data centres, then other kinds of manufacturing.”
However, hosting such crucial infrastructure in space presents formidable challenges, including the difficulty of maintenance and conducting upgrades, the high costs of rocket launches, and the ever-present risk of mission failure.
Addressing the current AI frenzy, the Amazon executive chair compared the wave to the dot-com era, where a period of intense hype was followed by a sharp market correction.
“We should be extremely optimistic that the societal and beneficial consequences of AI, like we had with the internet 25 years ago, are for real and there to stay,” he stated. “It is important to decorrelate the potential bubbles and their bursting consequences that might or might not happen from the actual reality.” He concluded that the benefits of AI were expected “to be broadly diffused and it will go everywhere.”
