- Says AI influence on being deep and lasting despite bubble risks.
- Calls for bubble effects to be separated from long -term benefits.
- Cites challenges including maintenance, costs, rocket launch errors.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezo’s predicted Friday that Gigawatt-Scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years and that continuously available solar energy would eventually make them outdo those based on Earth.
When he spoke on the Italian tech week in Turin, Bezos also compared the increase in artificial intelligence with the internet boom in the early 2000s and called for optimism despite the risk of speculative bubbles.
The concept of orbital data centers has been given traction among tech giants, as those on earth have driven the demand for electricity and water to cool their servers.
“These gigantic training clusters, these will be better built in space because we have solar energy there, 24/7. There is no clouds and no rain, no weather,” Bezos said in a public conversation with the Ferrari Race.mi and Stellantis Stlam.mi President John Elkann.
“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space for the next few decades.”
Bezos said the shift to space infrastructure is part of a wider tendency to use space to improve life on Earth.
“It has already happened with weather and communication satellites,” he said. “The next step is data centers, then other forms of manufacture.”
Hosting of data centers in space presents its own challenges, including the difficulty of maintenance and performance of upgrades, as well as the cost of launching rockets along with the risk of launching launching.
Amazon’s executive chairman said the AI wave shares features with the dot-com era, where massive hype was followed by a crash.
“We should be extremely optimistic that the societal and beneficial consequences of AI that we had with the Internet 25 years ago are real and there to stay,” he said.
“It is important to decorate the potential bubbles and their blasting consequences that may or may not happen from actual reality,” Bezos said, adding that the benefits of AI were expected to be broadly diffuse and it will go everywhere. “
