Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin on Wednesday announced a plan to deploy 5,408 satellites in space for a communications network that will serve data centers, governments and businesses, jumping into a satellite constellation market dominated by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Deployment of satellites is planned to begin in the last quarter of 2027, Blue Origin said, adding the network will be designed to have data speeds of up to 6 Tbps anywhere on Earth.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday thatGoogle's goal is to start putting data centers in space, powered by the sun, as soon as 2027. "We are taking our first step in '27," he said. "We'll send tiny, tiny racks of machines, and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there." In a decade, Pichai said that it'll be normal to build extraterrestrial data centers.
There are, however, a couple of reasons why data centers in space are being considered. There are plenty of reports about how the increased amount of AI processing is affecting power consumption within data centers; the World Economic Forum has estimated that the power required to handle AI is increasing at a rate of between 26% and 36% annually. Therefore, it is not surprising that organizations are looking at other options.
