AWS CEO throws cold water on AI data centers in space

• AWS CEO Matt Garman said space data centers are unlikely to be practical for another decade or two.
• Expensive rocket launches, heat management, radiation, and server costs pose major hurdles, he said.
• "These are all technically solvable problems," he said. "It's just going to take a while."

AI data centers in space aren't taking off anytime soon, according to Amazon cloud chief Matt Garman.

On an episode of the Sources Podcast released Tuesday, Garman cast doubt on the near-term prospect of orbital data centers, saying they are "highly unlikely to be economically feasible or practical in the next decade or two."

Space-based data centers "sounds good," Garman said, because they could tap free energy in orbit, but explained rocket launches into space are still "relatively infrequent and expensive."

"We as a world don't do one launch a day today," said Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, adding, "We're landing in a data center today one GPU every 14 seconds."

The idea of orbital data centers has been championed by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, as a potential solution to AI's soaring energy demands.

Earlier this year, SpaceX said it aims to build a "constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers" and that it had begun hiring engineers to make the vision a reality. In January, Musk said that within three years "at the latest" space could be the cheapest place to put data centers.

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is also among the tech billionaires who have embraced the idea of space-based data centers to scale AI.

In a CNBC interview in May, Bezos called data centers in space "very realistic," though he said the timeline could take longer than some expect.

"Some of the timelines we hear are very short," Bezos said. "People would talk about two or three years. That's probably a little ambitious."

On the Sources Podcast, Garman said space-based facilities would face a major engineering challenge in managing heat.

"Dissipating heat in space is actually quite hard," Garman told podcast host Alex Heath. "It's just a really hard environment. There's radiation everywhere, so you have to build things."

Garman said it would be "way more" expensive to build servers in space, but the feat is not impossible.

"These are all technically solvable problems," he said. "It's just going to take a while."

Garman also expressed skepticism about underwater data centers. "Oceans, there's some of those same problems," he said. "I find oceans to be also probably impractical."

Deserts, however, seemed to strike Garman as a more plausible frontier.

"I think deserts of those three that you mentioned are by far the most likely," Garman told Heath. "You have relatively good environmental areas. You actually have heat sinks. You have solar areas that you could do it."

Though Garman argued building data centers far from communities would mean towns miss out on the increased tax base and high-paying jobs data centers can bring.

During the interview, Garman pushed back on concerns about data centers' water use, saying Amazon's largest facilities use less water than 40 US households.