The Amazon founder predicts that the insatiable energy demands of artificial intelligence will drive the construction of gigawatt-scale computing facilities in space, powered by constant sunlight.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the space exploration company Blue Origin, has predicted that the next frontier for the technology industry lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Speaking this week at the Italian Tech Week 2025 conference, Mr. Bezos forecast that within the next two decades, massive data centers, powered by orbital solar arrays, will be built in space to accommodate the voracious energy needs of artificial intelligence.
The prediction comes as the world’s leading technology companies are engaged in a fierce race to develop ever-more powerful A.I. systems, an endeavor that requires an immense and rapidly growing amount of computational power. Building and operating these massive data centers on Earth presents a significant challenge due to their soaring energy consumption. “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,” Mr. Bezos said, as published in PCMag. To put the scale of such facilities in perspective, a single gigawatt is roughly the output of a large nuclear power plant.
Mr. Bezos argued that space offers a more efficient and sustainable solution to this impending energy crunch. In orbit, solar panels can capture energy continuously, unhindered by weather or the day-night cycle. “So these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space because we have solar power there, 24/7,” he explained, as published in PCMag. “And the solar power there, there are no clouds, no rain, no weather.” He asserted that within a couple of decades, orbital data centers would be able to “beat the cost of terrestrial data centers.”
This vision is intrinsically linked to the ambitions of Mr. Bezos’s own aerospace company, Blue Origin. The successful deployment of such large-scale infrastructure in space would depend on the availability of heavy-lift, reusable rockets capable of transporting the necessary components into orbit—a technology that Blue Origin is actively developing with its New Glenn vehicle. The concept of space-based data centers, while ambitious, is not unique to Mr. Bezos; other ventures are also exploring the potential benefits of orbital computing, which include natural cooling in the vacuum of space and the ability to transmit data globally via laser links.
The prediction by Mr. Bezos reframes the future of both the technology industry and space exploration, suggesting a future in which the two are deeply intertwined. If his forecast proves accurate, the next great leap for artificial intelligence may not be in a server farm on Earth, but in a sprawling, sun-powered facility orbiting high above it, fundamentally altering the landscape of heavy industry and energy consumption for generations to come.
Based on the original article published by PCMag, available at: https://www.pcmag.com/news/jeff-bezos-predicts-well-have-gigawatt-data-centers-in-space-in-20-years
