Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, speaking at the Italian Tech Week conference, this week predicted a gigawatt-scale data center will be running in space within the next 10-plus years.
A key reason to place massive data centers in space: full-time and unfettered solar power as an energy source.
“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,” Bezos said in a public conversation with Ferrari (RACE.MI), according to a story from Reuters today.
“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” said Bezos.
Of course, standing up a data center in outer space presents a massive technical challenge, such as the costs and risks of rocket launches, maintenance and executing upgrades.
There also is the possibility of an AI bubble, though Bezos said the overall trajectory of AI is upward.
“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 said, adding that the benefits of AI are expected “to be broadly diffused and it will go everywhere”.
After founding Amazon 31 years ago, Bezos remained CEO until 2021. He currently is executive chairman of the company. He also owns the Blue Origin space business, which is building rockets to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
