Jeff Bezos runs datacenters through AWS, and he runs a space company in Blue Origin, and he seems to believe that these two businesses could converge in the coming years.
The Amazon founder and executive chairman made a bold prediction recently about the future of computing infrastructure, suggesting that massive AI training facilities will eventually migrate beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Speaking with characteristic long-term vision, Bezos outlined a timeline that places space-based datacenters as a practical reality within the next two decades—a forecast that bridges his dual interests in cloud computing dominance and space exploration.
“One of the things that’s gonna happen in the next, it’s hard to know exactly when, it’s 10 plus years, but I bet it’s not more than 20 years: we’re gonna start building these giant gigawatt datacenter clusters in space,” Bezos said. “So these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space because we have solar power there 24/7.”
The economic argument behind Bezos’s vision is straightforward but ambitious. “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial datacenters in space in the next couple of decades,” he predicted. This cost advantage would stem primarily from uninterrupted access to solar energy—a resource that’s abundant and continuous beyond Earth’s day-night cycle and atmospheric interference.
Bezos framed space-based datacenters as part of a broader pattern of orbital infrastructure benefiting life on Earth. “Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better,” he explained. “It already has happened with weather satellites. It’s already happened with communication satellites. The next step is gonna be datacenters and other kinds of manufacturing.”
The prediction arrives at a moment when there are concerns over whether humans would be able to generate all the electricity required to run AI datacenters in the coming years. Training large language models and other AI systems requires enormous amounts of power, and datacenters already account for a significant portion of global energy consumption. Tech companies have been racing to secure power sources, with some reviving nuclear plants and others striking deals for renewable energy. Space-based facilities could theoretically sidestep these constraints entirely, though significant technical and logistical hurdles remain—including launch costs, construction in orbit, heat dissipation in vacuum, and data transmission latency. Still, with Blue Origin developing heavy-lift rockets and AWS controlling roughly a third of the cloud computing market, Bezos is uniquely positioned to pursue this convergence. Whether his 20-year timeline proves accurate or optimistic, the vision reflects growing recognition that the AI revolution’s infrastructure demands may eventually push humanity’s computational ambitions beyond the planet’s surface.