What’s the next killer app for the final frontier? According to Jeff Bezos, it’s a future fleet of gigawatt data centers, flying in orbit and powered by sunlight.
Bezos — who founded the Amazon retail giant as well as his privately held Blue Origin space venture — pointed to the prospects for orbital data centers on Oct. 3 during a fireside chat at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. He cast the technology as the most cost-efficient way to satisfy the tech industry’s need for more power to fuel advances in artificial intelligence.
But don’t expect cloud computing to leave Earth behind immediately. Bezos estimated that the transition from Earth-based to space-based data processing would take more than 10 years.
“I bet it’s not more than 20 years,” he said. “We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. So, these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7.”
