Turin (Reuters)-Amazon’s founder and executive, said on Friday that data centers on gigawatts scale will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years, predicting that they will eventually overcome Earth’s based on uninterrupted solar energy.
The number of these huge centers, which store computing infrastructure, is growing exponentially as the world increasingly uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing, generating an increase in demand for electricity and water to cool its servers.
“One of the things that will happen in the coming years – it’s hard to know exactly when it’s over ten years, and I bet it’s not over 20 years – we’ll start building these gigantic gigawatts databases in space,” Bezos said during an informal conversation with Ferrari and Stellantis, John Elkann at the Italian technology week in Turin.
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The concept of space -based data centers is gaining strength between large technology companies as energy needs to maintain such operations on Earth are growing dramatically.
“These giant training clusters will be better built in space, because we have solar energy there, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no clouds, no rain, no climate,” said Bezos. “We will be able to overcome the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the coming decades.”
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Bezos said the change to orbital infrastructure is part of a broader trend of using space to improve life on earth.
“This has happened to the weather satellites. It has happened with the communication satellites. The next step will be the data centers and then other types of manufacturing,” he said.
However, hosting data centers in space has its own challenges, including complicated maintenance, difficulties for updates, high rocket launch costs, as well as risk of unsuccessful releases.
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(Reportagem de Elvira Pollina and Giulio Piovaccari; Texto de Elvira Pollina)
