Jeff Bezos’s New AI Hardware Startup Isn’t Even His Biggest Moonshot

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 AI 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.â€

And of course, Elon Musk has made the most ambitious and optimistic pitch on how AI in space might play out. In a recent appearance at the Baron Capital Conference, Musk suggested that Starlink satellites would be able to generate as much as 100 gigawatts of power every year by harnessing solar energy. “We have a plan mapped out to do it,†he said. “It gets crazy.†There’s also never been a more friendly audience to receive that message: Baron Capital backed Musk’s $1 trillion pay package at Tesla, and its founder, Ron Baron, has talked up Tesla at every opportunity, including a recent CNBC hit where he said the company could be a $10,000 stock.

The tech execs clamouring to clutter space with their AI data centers have a believer in Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida. As WSJ points out, Metzger recently voiced his support for the data center space race, writing on X, “I originally expected it would be 30-50 years before it would be cheaper in space, but I ran quantitative numbers twice and both times they predicted only 10 to 11 years.â€

There are a couple of intuitive reasons why aiming for the stars makes sense for data centers. Orbital data centers could save us from selling off all our precious terrestrial real estate to big, mostly empty boxes of whirring fans and information-crunching chips. And they would be closer to the sun to capitalize on solar power capabilities. But actually achieving this goal isn’t as easy as just firing some servers into orbit. Data centers generate lots of heat and need to be cooled, and simply letting that heat dissipate in space is inefficient and possibly insufficient. Assembling the data centers in space is possible, but maintaining them could be challenging—and any failure is going to be harder than it would be on Earth.

Then there’s the fact that we’re already dealing with an increasingly crowded orbital area. A recent study found that satellites in orbit are performing collision-avoidance maneuvers at seven times the frequency than they were just five years ago, and those precautions will increasingly become necessary the more we send into orbit.

We do have another option: pump the brakes on the AI buildout before we overcommit so much that we litter the planet and space with technology that might never get utilized in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, it seems like that might be the even bigger moonshot.