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Amazon has more than 900 data centers spread across the planet. And if you ask Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, that is exactly where they’ll stay for the foreseeable future.
Speaking at a tech conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Garman threw some cold water on the notion of space-based data centers, which have been touted by Elon Musk and others as the future of AI.
While putting AI data centers in space has obvious benefits, including the ability to harness energy directly from the sun and the ability to cool the heat-generating equipment in the cold atmosphere of space, Garman said there are also some big obstacles to putting data centers in space or on other planets. Chief among them is the cost of transporting equipment.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen a rack of servers lately: They’re heavy,” Garman said in an interview at the Cisco AI Summit in answer to a question about the viability of space-based data centers. “And last I checked, humanity has yet to build a permanent structure in space. So … maybe.”
The comments come one day after Musk announced the merger of SpaceX, his roc...
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