By Greg Bensinger
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 3 (Reuters) – Amazon’s top cloud computing executive said space-based data centers are “pretty far” from being a reality, even as a number of startups and the company’s own founder, Jeff Bezos, have pursued the idea.
The explosive growth of artificial intelligence requires vast amounts of computing power and cooling, straining the capacity of land-based data centers. That has pushed cloud computing firms to consider alternatives, such as sending the equipment to space where terrestrial concerns are lessened.
However, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, at the Cisco AI Summit in San Francisco, said the difficulties of sending servers, satellites and other equipment into orbit make the realities of the idea extremely difficult.
“There are not enough rockets to launch a million satellites yet, so we’re, like, pretty far from that,” he said when asked about the idea. “If you think about the cost of getting a payload in space today, it’s massive.”
“It is just not economical,” he said.
A number of startups are working to design data centers in space that they say could eliminate some of the complexities of land-based data centers, such as overheating. Blue Origin, the rocket company Bezos founded, is exploring the concept, according to reports.
The merger of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI this week is also meant to help facilitate data centers in outer space. Musk said in a memo that such data centers will be critical as “global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions.”
Alphabet’s Google in November announced Project Suncatcher, an orbital data center project that the company said could have test launches as soon as next year.
(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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