TURIN: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centres will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years and that continuously available solar energy meant they would eventually outperform those based on Earth.The concept of orbital data centres has gained traction among tech giants as those on Earth have driven up demand for electricity and water to cool their servers. “These giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7. There are no clouds and no rain, no weather,” Bezos said in a public conversation with Ferrari and Stellantis chairman John Elkann at the Italian Tech Week in Turin.“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centres in space in the next couple of decades,” he said.Bezos said the shift to space infrastructure is part of a broader trend of using space to improve life on Earth. “It’s already happened with weather and communication satellites,” he said. “The next step is data centres, then other kinds of manufacturing.”Hosting data centres in space has its own challenges, including the difficulty of maintenance and carrying out upgrades and the cost of launching rockets, as well as the risk the launches may fail.‘AI an industrial bubble that will benefit society’Artificial intelligence is in an “industrial bubble,” Bezos said, but the benefits to society will be “immense”.“Investors don’t usually give a team of six people a couple billion dollars with no product… and that’s happening today,” he said. “This is a kind of industrial bubble,” said Bezos, who has invested in the AI startup Perplexity. “But that is not the same as a banking bubble such as the 2008 crisis.”“Those bubbles society wants to avoid. The ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad, it could even be good, because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions… and that’s what’s going to happen here.”“This is real,” Bezos continued. “The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” Multiple technologies are in a kind of “golden age,” he said, echoing language used by US President Trump. “There’s never been a better time to be excited about the future.”“AI is real. And it is going to change every industry… it is going to affect every company in the world.” (Reuters, AFP)
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