What’s the subsequent killer app for the ultimate frontier? In response to Jeff Bezos, it’s a future fleet of gigawatt information facilities, flying in orbit and powered by daylight.
Bezos — who based the Amazon retail large in addition to his privately held Blue Origin area enterprise — pointed to the prospects for orbital information facilities final Friday throughout a hearth chat at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. He solid the know-how as probably the most cost-efficient approach to fulfill the tech trade’s want for extra energy to gasoline advances in synthetic intelligence.
However don’t anticipate cloud computing to depart Earth behind instantly. Bezos estimated that the transition from Earth-based to space-based information processing would take greater than 10 years.
“I guess it’s no more than 20 years,” he mentioned. “We’re going to start out constructing these large gigawatt information facilities in area. So, these large coaching clusters, these shall be higher in-built area, as a result of we have now solar energy there, 24/7.”
House-based photo voltaic arrays wouldn’t face the weather-related limitations that terrestrial solar-power installations should dwell with. As soon as the arrays are in orbit, the ability is mainly free.
“We will beat the price of terrestrial information facilities in area within the subsequent couple of many years,” Bezos mentioned. “House will find yourself being one of many locations that retains making Earth higher. It already has occurred with climate satellites. It’s already occurred with communication satellites. The subsequent step goes to be information facilities and different kinds of producing.”
A number of industrial ventures are already engaged on plans to place information facilities in area, together with Seattle-based Starcloud and Sophia Space, a California-based startup with important Seattle connections. Houston-based Axiom House tested an Amazon Web Services Snowcone cloud-computing device aboard the International Space Station in 2022. This yr, Axiom is gearing up to ship its first Orbital Information Middle nodes into low Earth orbit.
Throughout Friday’s hearth chat, Bezos talked about matters starting from recommendation for entrepreneurs (“The factor you at all times return to is these buyer wants”) to the repercussions of an AI funding bubble (“When the mud settles and also you see who’re the winners, society advantages from these innovations. … The advantages to society from AI are going to be gigantic”).
Bezos turned to his agenda for area commercialization towards the top of the speak. Listed here are a couple of extra tidbits from that a part of the fireplace chat:
- The subsequent launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is because of happen on the finish of October “or possibly the primary week of November,” Bezos mentioned. “We’re going to launch our New Glenn car, and we’re sending NASA’s Escapade satellites into orbit round Mars.”
- Bezos thinks there may very well be thousands and thousands of individuals residing in area throughout the subsequent couple of many years. “That’s how briskly that is going to speed up,” he mentioned. “They’ll largely be residing there as a result of they need to. Our robotic know-how is getting so good, we don’t want folks to dwell in area. Something that we’d like carried out … we can ship robots to do this work, and that’ll be rather more cost-effective than sending people.”
- What works of science fiction would Bezos suggest to readers or viewers? He talked up novelist Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which additionally occurs to be a favorite for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Bezos mentioned the sequence “has such an attention-grabbing utopian tackle the intersection of humanity and synthetic intelligence.”
- It’s now been 4 years since Bezos stepped down as CEO and president of Amazon whereas retaining the title of govt chair. On the age of 61, Bezos mentioned he’s “working very arduous” on Blue Origin — and on AI. “I’m the least retired particular person on the earth, and I’ll by no means retire as a result of work is an excessive amount of enjoyable,” he mentioned. “It’ll by no means occur.”
