Data centers in space? Jeff Bezos believes it can be done

Building gigawatt-scale data centers in space may not be a fairy tale. According to Jeff Bezos it may take one or two decades, but it will be possible.

The Founder and CEO of Amazon said this during the Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy, when asked what the world may look like in the years to come.

“It’s hard to know exactly when, it’s 10 plus years, but I bet it’s not more than 20 years, we’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space,” he said.

Data centers require a lot of power to operate, but that’s no problem in outer space.

“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. We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” Bezos said.

“It's already happened with weather and communication satellites. The next step is data centers, then other kinds of manufacturing,” he added,

Bezos, who is also the owner of the private American space company Blue Origin, told spectators we should be optimistic and see the shift to space infrastructure as part of a broader trend of using space to improve life on Earth. Just like satellites did decades ago.

“In the next kind of couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate,” he said.

In addition, the entrepreneur said we should embrace artificial intelligence (AI). He even compares the rise and popularity of AI with the dot-com era. As we all know, the dot-com bubble ended in a crash, but that shouldn’t hold us back.

“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. It is important to decorrelate the potential bubbles and their bursting consequences that might or might not happen from the actual reality,” Bezos said.

He added that the benefits of AI are expected “to be broadly diffused and it will go everywhere.”