Founder Jeff Bezos of Amazon said on Friday that massive, gigawatt scale data centers could work in space within the next 10 to 20 years, driven by constant solar energy that would eventually give them a lead on those on earth.
During the Italian techweek in Turin Bezos also compared the increase in artificial intelligence with the internet bloom of the early 2000s, and insisted on optimism despite the risk of speculative bubbles.
The concept of orbital data centers has received a grip among technical giants, because they have risen the demand for electricity and water on earth to cool their servers.
“These gigantic training clusters, which will be better built in space, because we have solar energy there 24/7. There are no clouds and no rain, no weather,” said Bezos in a public conversation with Ferrari Race.Mi and Stellantis Stam.mi chairman John Elkann.
“We will be able to beat the costs of terrestrial data centers in space in the coming decades.”
Bezos said that the shift to space -infrastructure is part of a wider trend of the use of space to improve life on earth.
“It has already happened with weather satellites again and communications,” he said. “The next step is data centers than other types of production.”
The hosting of data centers in space offers its own challenges, including the difficulty of maintenance and the execution of upgrades, as well as the costs for launching rockets, along with the risk that the launches can fail.
The executive chairman of Amazon said that the AI Wave is sharing properties with the DOT-COM era, when massive hype was followed by a crash.
“We must be extremely optimistic that the social and favorable consequences of AI, as we had had with the internet 25 years ago, really and there are to stay there,” he said.
“It is important to decorate the potential bubbles and their bursting consequences that would or may not happen from the real reality,” said Bezos, adding that the benefits of AI were expected to be “in broad lines and it will go everywhere”.
