Jeff Bezos believes that for artificial intelligence to keep expanding, data centers will eventually need to move off the Earth and into space. Speaking at the Italian Tech Week in Turin last week, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder said that the best way to reduce the environmental impact of these facilities was to move them off-planet.
Bezos’ concern is shared by many in the sciences and wider environmental movement. As artificial intelligence grows, scientists are worried Earth’s resources might not be able to keep up. In turn, Bezos predicted that humans will start building gigawatt-scale orbital data centers within the next 10 to 20 years.
“Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better,” he said.
“It already has happened with weather satellites. It’s already happened with communication satellites. The next step is going to be data centers and other kinds of manufacturing.”
Data centers are straining Earth’s resources
As tech giants pour billions into AI, data center construction is skyrocketing. These facilities house the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy AI models, and require huge amounts of energy and water to operate.
An April report by the International Energy Agency estimates that global water consumption for data centers is currently around 560 billion liters per year, and could rise to 1,200 billion liters per year by 2030. As for energy, the report found that global electricity consumption from data centers has grown about 12% per year since 2017, reaching 415 terawatt-hours in 2024. That’s enough to power tens of millions of homes.
The concept of orbital data centers as a potential solution isn’t new. Bezos and other figureheads of the tech industry have touted the idea as an effective way to support the AI boom without further driving up water and electricity demand.
Here’s how it would work.
Tapping limitless resources in space
In space, there’s no shortage of solar energy and extremely cold temperatures. The ability to leverage these constantly available resources would, in theory, allow us to power enormous data centers without needing water and electricity from Earth.
“These giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7,” Bezos said. “There are no clouds and no rain, no weather. We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades.”
What’s more, orbital data centers would help reduce air and water pollution on Earth. Traditional data centers emit greenhouse gases and other pollutants that harm the environment and public health, but in space, these emissions would not directly impact our planet. In the past, Bezos has touted the idea of moving other industrial work off Earth in order to preserve our planet, including setting up factories in orbit.
Some companies are already working to make Bexos’ vision a reality. In March, Florida-based firm Lonestar Data Holdings announced that it had successfully tested a miniature data center the size of a book in space. The “Freedom” data center payload hitched a ride to the Moon aboard Intuitive Machines’ Athena Lunar Lander, launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket earlier this year.
That said, we still have a long way to go before we can build the massive facilities Bezos is talking about. Such a feat presents numerous challenges that could take many decades to overcome. But as AI becomes a fixture of our everyday lives, coming up with innovative ways to mitigate its Earthly impact will be essential.