He’s not the only one looking up, either.
Here on Earth, regulators and citizens alike are realizing that there may be downsides to going all in on the demands of AI data centers and the companies that are building them, and pushback is starting to become more prevalent. But in space, no one can hear you object to the massive energy demands and dubious economic “benefits” of these massive infrastructure projects. That’s why Jeff Bezos (fresh off of announcing his big AI hardware startup Project Prometheus) and other tech billionaires are reaching for the stars and planning to put data centers in orbit, per the Wall Street Journal.
The idea of the space-based data center has been floating around for some time now. Bezos talked it up at Italian Tech Week last month, where he told an audience, “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s own space-based data venture, called Project Suncatcher, earlier this month. Nvidia has also gotten in on the action, announcing a plan for an orbital data center. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp recently said we’ll have data centers in space “in our life.
