AWS Chief Pours Cold Water on Musk's Orbital Data Centre Dream

AWS CEO Challenges Space Data Centre Vision

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has thrown a bucket of cold water on the growing enthusiasm for space-based data centres, calling the concept "pretty far" from reality despite ambitious plans from Elon Musk and growing interest across the tech industry.

Speaking at the Cisco AI Summit in San Francisco, Garman highlighted the enormous practical barriers standing in the way of putting computing infrastructure into orbit. He pointed to the sheer weight of modern server hardware and the fact that humanity has never built a permanent structure in space as fundamental obstacles.

The SpaceX-xAI Mega Merger

Garman's scepticism arrived just one day after Musk announced the merger of SpaceX with his artificial intelligence company xAI, creating the world's most valuable private company at a combined valuation of roughly one point two five trillion dollars. The deal, structured as a share exchange, represents the largest merger in corporate history.

At the heart of the merger lies Musk's vision for orbital data centres. SpaceX has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of up to one million satellites designed to harness solar power and meet global AI computing demands. Musk has argued that terrestrial electricity supplies simply cannot keep pace with AI's growing appetite for power.

The Economics Problem

Current launch costs sit between two thousand five hundred and five thousand dollars per kilogram, far above the sub-two hundred dollar threshold that experts estimate would be needed for orbital computing to compete with ground-based facilities. Additional challenges include heat dissipation in vacuum conditions, radiation damage to hardware, and the impossibility of sending technicians for physical repairs.

A Crowded Race

Musk is not alone in eyeing the stars. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin recently unveiled TeraWave, a planned satellite communications network of over five thousand satellites targeting enterprise customers. Google's Project Suncatcher aims to launch prototype AI satellites by twenty twenty-seven. Even Starcloud has already deployed the first commercial GPU to orbit and successfully trained a language model in space.

Despite the growing momentum, Amazon operates more than nine hundred terrestrial data centres worldwide, and Garman made clear they will remain firmly on the ground for the foreseeable future.