Jeff Bezos Predicts Gigawatt Data Centers in Space Within Two Decades (reuters.com) 64
Jeff Bezos told an audience on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next ten to twenty years. The Amazon founder said these orbital facilities would eventually outperform their terrestrial counterparts because space offers uninterrupted solar power around the clock.
Bezos was speaking in a fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. He said the giant training clusters needed for AI would be better built in space because there are no clouds, rain or weather to interrupt power generation. Bezos predicted that space-based data centers would beat the cost of Earth-based ones within a couple of decades. He described the shift as part of a broader pattern that has already occurred with weather satellites and communication satellites. The next steps would be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing.
Bezos was speaking in a fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. He said the giant training clusters needed for AI would be better built in space because there are no clouds, rain or weather to interrupt power generation. Bezos predicted that space-based data centers would beat the cost of Earth-based ones within a couple of decades. He described the shift as part of a broader pattern that has already occurred with weather satellites and communication satellites. The next steps would be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing.
Get those stupid AI data centers on the moon (Score:2, Troll)
So we don't have to deal with them, and we can send Sam Altman to look after them.
Cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cooling (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes and yes.
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/1... [hackaday.com]
"This is where skepticism creeps in. After all, cooling is the greatest challenge with high performance computing hardware here on earth, and heat rejection is the great constraint of space operations. The âoeicy blackness of spaceâ you see in popular culture is as realistic as warp drive; space is a thermos, and shedding heat is no trivial issue. It is also, from an engineering perspective, not a complex issue. Weâ(TM)ve been cooling spacecraft and satellites using radiators to shed heat via infrared emission for decades now. Itâ(TM)s pretty easy to calculate that if you have X watts of heat to reject at Y degrees, you will need a radiator of area Z. The Stephan-Boltzmann Law isnâ(TM)t exactly rocket science."
Devil will be in the details for how much cooling capacity is needed to reject the heat generated by the GPUs, how long the satellites are designed to last, stationkeeping, etc.
The current trend is toward smaller, disposable satellites, so I don't know if what Bezos is envisioning is a massive distributed cluster of smaller satellites, or a return to larger satellites that are docked to a compute pod payload...
I mean, this could be one possible proposal for keeping the ISS - jettison most everything but the solar panels and radiators, and add station keeping and a compute payload module. Keep the cupola, canada arm, docking capability for tourist and maintenance visits.
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As a point of reference, the current ISS cooling system can reject 75kW of heat, from a combined area of 84.864m^2. Those radiators are only part of the system, the External Active Thermal Control System, and they are continuously rotated to optimise heat loss from them.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and the cited https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/47348... [nasa.gov]
So that ballparks 2GW requiring ~2250m^2 of radiators. Remember, it needs mechanisms for rotating, and to be placed so that they're mostly not radia
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In space, radiators work by expelling infrared light.
Re:Cooling (Score:5, Informative)
In space, radiators work by expelling infrared light.
Infrared light emissions depend on temperature to the 4th power so they barely work at all for lower temperatures and only start being efficient at high temperatures. This means your effective size needs to be huge unless you’re OK with temperatures of several hundred degrees. Putting heavy things in space is extremely expensive, and good luck servicing the system if anything goes wrong. Most satellites stay cool by using many layers of reflective/insulating material and not generating much internal heat at all, unlike a data center with hundreds of thousands of watts. The idea all these extra expenses are more than a battery and 2-4x the solar panels makes no sense at all.
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The economics, on the other hand, yeah you wouldn't think so. But you would think Bezos would pay somebody to run some numbers before backing the idea in public.
In the old days I would have said the DoD (now hosted at http://war.gov/ [war.gov] - impressive!?) would surely pioneer this. But these days big tech is so much richer than even the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is a harsh mistress. (Score:2)
Heat up rocks and drop them?
Space-based deathrays.
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You have to understand, when you have more money than you could possible spend, you definitely can NOT live in actual reality anymore. Everything around you is warped by the wealth. No true information can ever reach you. That is why it seems practical for orbiting gigawatt data centers.
There are very large areas of the USA alone that are uninhabitable but still cheaper and more reasonable than orbiting data centers... but here we are, 'expecting' orbiting data centers in 20 years or less. All because we le
Re: Cooling (Score:2)
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I think even Musk knows enough engineering to not propose an idea this monumentally stupid.
There's videos scattered about the web where Musk answers questions about solar powered this and that in space and he's clearly annoyed about it. He's done the math, likely had many people under his employ triple check the math, and there's no real value in going to orbit to harness solar power for anything.
Certainly there's solar PV panels on all sorts of satellites to get power but this is a matter of getting power to systems for the purpose of having "high ground" for the purpose of relaying communicati
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How would they handle the enormous cooling requirements? Can they use some sort of passive heat radiation? Do cooling fins work in space?
Dissipating through thermal radiation would basically be the only option but the radiating surface area required to keep temperatures reasonably low would need to be enormous.
TL;DR: Unrealistic.
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Space is very cold but also a super insulator.
So getting rid of heat is also very problematic.
Elon would have consulted his experts. Jeff is just blabbering something utterly impossible
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and what exactly (Score:2)
We all know he's not doing this (Score:4, Insightful)
The purpose of this is to get a little bit of positive attention directed his way that will appeal to a certain class of voter and consumer.
Right now every single mega corporation is basically taking all the water and electricity for their data centers and leaving communities with nothing.
This is him telling those communities that they don't need to worry about losing their water and electricity because the data center will be in space soon anyway.
It's all completely nonsensical but it works because the news media is complicit and any journalist that tries to push back against it gets fired.
It's a sign of our institutions fundamentally breaking down that bullshit like this can make it into the news cycle.
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Exactly this.
The fact its even being mentioned is a complete farce.
It's stupid on so many levels that it isn't even funny.
However, while we're distracted, mega-corps continue to rape our environment of the stuff actual humans require to survive.
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Over wifi [slashdot.org].
Oh, you meant back to Earth? Well thanks to the slingshot effect and general relativity, Amazon's patent-pending technology can deliver search results to your browser before you've even submitted the initial query.
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You aren't going to remotely host your gaming PC this way. But for deep neural nets, which have a massive computation-to-IO ratio, that's a different ballgame. E.g. for an LLM the input might be a prompt of a couple dozen bytes, and the output might be a paragraph of a couple hundred bytes. But a lot of computation is needed to get from the input to the output.
(The AI would also need an onboard mirror of any part of the internet it can search for answ
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Bezos is trying to create a new reason for his many-days-late and many-dollars-short launch system now that a competitor already is operating a much more functional LEO satellite network without his help.
This is what is known in the startup space as a "pivot" when you realize the target market you had in mind is already being serviced by someone doing it better than you can - you try to justify the enormous expense you've already sunk into creating a solution to an already solved problem.
What a crock⦠(Score:2)
Jeff sounds like he's trying to kick off another round of funding for his c-tier rocket company. Weâ(TM)ll have data centers with dedicated SMRs on site long before we have data centers in space. Hell, we might have fusion powered data centers before it's cost effective to built them in space.
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Re: What a crock⦠(Score:2)
Virgin Galactic is even worse. 100s of millions spent on a crap spaceplane that doesnt even get to 60 miles up and hasnt gone anywhere in the last 15 months.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same type of investor hype bullshit Musk has been peddling about sending people to Mars.
Throw out some wildly huge numbers with minuscule small timelines.
Why? Because they both own space agencies. That's it. That's all it is.
They're both already doing really cool and innovative stuff with their space agencies! They don't NEED to be blowing smoke out their asses, but they're constantly in this pissing contest to see who can come up with the most "believable" and yet wildly outlandish idea of their capabilities.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Replying to myself since I was curious and had to look it up:
The International Space Station has about 100 kilowatts power generation capability.
The article says "datacenters" - plural, but for now, let's just assume a single gigawatt datacenter in space in 20 years.
That's about 7300 days.
A single gigawatt datacenter would consume about 10,000x the power generation capabilities of the ISS.
Starting today, we'd need to launch more than 1 ISS PER DAY to reach this goal in 20 years, for a single gigawatt datacenter.
I think this brings the absurdity of the situation into a little more crystal clear of a picture.
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I think this brings the absurdity of the situation into a little more crystal clear of a picture.
It really doesn't do anything to illuminate the situation. It would if the ISS were built to generate/consume a lot of power, but it's not. Quite the opposite. It's designed to provide a reasonable amount of power to run life support and energy to run some experiments.
It may, of course, be true that orbital gigawatt data centers are a lot more than twenty years away, but the comparison with ISS doesn't tell us anything.
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I thought this was a dupe (Score:2)
This is the Elon Musk playbook (Score:4, Interesting)
It also tells communities that are having all that water and electricity taken by data centers not to worry because they're going to be in space soon. It's similar to the shit Elon Musk did with the boring company used to shut down High-Speed rail in California.
It is frustrating as hell to see this goddamn playbook being used again. And it works because the media plays along. Anyone who doesn't just gets fired. If they try to start their own news media Network they get bought out or run out of business since we don't have any antitrust laws anymore.
This is bad on so many levels.
Waste heat disposal? (Score:2)
Large computer centers in space seems like a really bad idea, unless you plan on doing something like capturing an asteroid to use as a heat sink. The moon is much more plausible..but you'd still need to connect down to bedrock.
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... and service calls are an absolute bitch. They would either need to launch it with every spare they would ever need and the ability to recover from hardware failure with zero touch, or they're going to have >$100m servicing missions to replace hard drives and fans and shit.
It's fantastically stupid.
Thats a hell of an IT bill (Score:5, Interesting)
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You would think he would have a clue, considering his personal problems with remote work!
and millions to ship new parts to them (install fe (Score:2)
and millions to ship new parts to them (install fees just as high)
Suuure (Score:2)
And flying cars, personal humanoid robot assistants and some other crap.
Skynet (Score:1)
Clownshow hype (Score:2)
If you disagree, please describe the workloads which require being in space and have an ROI justifying both deployment and ongoing maintenance costs for this stupidity.
Damned physics. (Score:2)
I think he's ignoring the cost per kilogram to get it there. I suspect that heat management strictly by radiation won't be fast enough, so you'll still need to crank up surface area to cool the chips. So you can't even save mass there.
Of course my non-physicist brain might have that wrong..
Why bother building when you can use magic? (Score:1)
I mean, if you tried to build something in space, you'd have to contend with
1. Launch costs
2. Cooling
3. Radiation tolerance
4. Comms access
5. Launch costs for upgrades and replacements
Way easier to wave a magic wand. That's where the real money is going to be. Mark my words.
Space and power (Score:2, Insightful)
space offers uninterrupted solar power around the clock
So does planet Earth, if you have a worldwide grid powered by solar... :)
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replying to cancel unintentional down-mod
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uninterrupted solar power around the clock as long as some big ball does not stand between space dc and light source. As far as I know polar orbits are more expensive/difficult to setup.
Bezos is not in business of running space dcs. He wants cut in business of building them. Plus R&D of blowing taxpayer money in low Earth orbit.
So a Blackwell cabinet is 1360 kgs... (Score:2)
At $1600/kg to get into low-earth-orbit we're talking $2.2m today to get than into space before any infrastructure to support it. When did Jeff project he puts his first space elevator into operation to actually get all this gear up there?
More space junk (Score:2)
You laugh, but... (Score:2)
...a former colleague of mine is now working with a startup that's all about orbiting compute. Their business model is basically to let other satellite builders / operators offload their computing needs to dedicated satellites. The customers get lighter satellites (less expensive to launch) and it's more efficient from a computing perspective because a lot of satellites are running their existing compute with a relatively low duty-cycle, whereas the dedicated-compute satellites will aggregate that bursty de
Not this Bozo again (Score:2)
This clown can barely get a rocket into space in the span of 20 years. Gigawatt data centers? I don't think so.
Mirrors instead (Score:2)
Just no. Not Power or Heat; Kessler Effect (Score:3)
Or worse, what if some bad player shoots a missile into one of those centres? This would cause orders of magnitude worse results than a simple collision. If a cloud of debris started orbiting, it could knock out a large portion of the world's computing power (assuming most adopted this silly idea). If most of the data centres were put in space and that worst case scenario happened, the whole world would shut down. And if you moved the centres far enough apart in space, they would be so high up the communications lag would have just as bad a consequence.
For shit like this, you have to plan for worst case. It's why they put berms around terrestrial data centres and have enough security to protect a gold repository, just about. Right now, there is no way to protect against a Kessler Syndrome/Effect/Event if it happens.
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I approve this plan.
Alternate plan (Score:2)
Take the $billions you were going to spend on Solar Powered Space Data Centers, and instead build equivalent Solar Powered data centers here on Earth at 1% of the cost. Make up for the lack of 24/7 sunlight by adding additional solar panels, energy storage, and transmission lines as necessary.
Then take the other 90% of the money that you just saved, and spend it on cocaine and hookers.
Your ping times will be much better also.
A set of AI brains living in a satellite... (Score:2)
I've seen that movie. It was GitS:SAC 2nd Gig. The Tachikoma's brains lived in a satellite.
If Bezos brings Tachikomas to real life, even as delivery vehicles, with the brains in space... count me in!
Bezos and his boyfriend Trump will be dead (Score:2)
Put just the solar power source in space (Score:2)
#nealstephenson (Score:1)
Latency (Score:2)
Just wait till that thing crashes to earth! (Score:2)
I can see it now. The thrusters on the data center fail, causing its orbit to become unstable. The huge boat anchor crashes back to earth *somewhere*. Some of it would burn up in the atmosphere, but not all.
Attractive space war target (Score:2)
Big lasers are making it easier than ever to cripple a satellite in orbit. If some country gets irate, or some rogue state wants to cause mayhem, they could cause a lot of mayhem by crippling one of those big data centers.
pipe (Score:2)
I've been around long enough to have heard a lot of predictions from solons. So far, none has happened as predicted. And what has happened was not predicted.