Overview

• Speaking at Italian Tech Week in Turin, Jeff Bezos said space-based facilities could host giant AI training clusters and ultimately undercut Earth-based data centers on cost.
• Tom’s Hardware estimates a 1 GW orbital system would need roughly 2.4–3.3 million m² of solar panels weighing about 9,000–11,250 tonnes, with launch costs likely in the tens of billions of dollars.
• Handling the heat would demand millions of square meters of radiators, adding substantial mass and cost beyond the solar arrays themselves.
• Latency would limit which services could run from orbit, with estimates around 20–40 ms from low Earth orbit and up to about 600 ms from geostationary orbit, making latency-sensitive workloads impractical.
• Prototype efforts remain small: HPE’s Spaceborne program saw hardware failures on the ISS, and Axiom’s shoebox-sized AxDCU-1 arrived in August, underscoring how far the field is from gigawatt-scale operations.