CaliToday (04/10/2025): Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos issued a bold prediction on Friday, forecasting that gigawatt-scale data centers will be constructed in space within the next 10 to 20 years. He argued that the constant availability of solar power in orbit means they will ultimately outperform their Earth-based counterparts.
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| “We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space,” Jeff Bezos said Friday. Getty Images |
Speaking at Italian Tech Week in Turin, Bezos also drew a compelling parallel between the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, urging long-term optimism despite the risks of a speculative bubble.
The concept of orbital data centers has been gaining traction among tech giants as the insatiable demand for electricity and water to cool terrestrial server farms continues to surge, driven largely by the AI revolution.
"These giant training clusters, these centers would be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7. No clouds, no rain, no weather," Bezos said during an on-stage conversation with John Elkann, the Chairman of Ferrari and Stellantis. "We will be able to outcompete the cost of terrestrial data centers in space within the next couple of decades."
A New Frontier for a Power-Hungry Industry
Bezos framed the shift to space-based infrastructure not as a novelty, but as the next logical step in a broader trend of leveraging space to improve life on Earth. He explained that this migration has happened before and will happen again.
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| Bezos spoke with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann at the Italian Tech Week in Turin. “These giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7,: he said. REUTERS |
"It has happened with weather satellites. It has happened with communications satellites. The next step is going to be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing," he said.
However, placing critical infrastructure in orbit presents its own formidable set of challenges. These include the extreme difficulty of performing maintenance and hardware upgrades in a zero-gravity environment, the significant cost associated with rocket launches, and the inherent risk that any given launch could fail, destroying billions of dollars of equipment.
AI Now, Dot-Com Then: Separating the Bubble from the Reality
Shifting his focus to the most dominant technology of the current era, the Amazon Executive Chairman said the AI wave shares distinct characteristics with the dot-com period, when immense hype and speculation famously led to a market crash.
Despite this, Bezos's message was one of resounding optimism. He stressed the importance of distinguishing between a potential financial bubble and the underlying, permanent value of the technology itself.
"We should be enormously optimistic that the societal consequences and benefits of AI, just like what we saw with the internet 25 years ago, are real and are going to be everlasting," he stated.
"It's important to separate the potential bubbles and the consequences of their popping, which may or may not happen, from the reality," Bezos said, adding that the benefits of AI are expected "to be pervasive and to be everywhere."