Amazon's AWS CEO does not agree with Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai 'Space solution' for data centres; says: It is just not ...

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has dismissed the feasibility of space-based data centres. According to a report by the news agency Reuters, Garman called the concept uneconomical in a recent interview.

His comments undermine the huge confidence shown by tech leaders, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.“It is just not economical,” Garman said at the Cisco AI Summit in San Francisco. To explain his distrust, he cited the high cost of launching payloads into orbit and insufficient rocket capacity to support the infrastructure required for orbital data centres, Reuters reported. This comes as both Musk and Pichai have shared their ambitions to build artificial intelligence (AI) training data centres in space to reduce dependence on Earth’s resources. Last month, Musk announced the merger of SpaceX and xAI. One reason for the move is to establish a support system for the development of data centres in outer space. In a memo, Musk said it will be critical because "global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions." In November 2025, Google announced Project Suncatcher. This is the Pichai-led company’s orbital data centre initiative, which could begin test launches as early as next year.

What are AWS CEO Matt Garman’s concerns about AI data centres in space

Garman pointed towards the practical barriers that make the concept ‘impossible’ even in the coming years.“There are not enough rockets to launch a million satellites yet, so we're, like, pretty far from that. If you think about the cost of getting a payload in space today, it's massive,” he said, as per the Reuters report.The debate over space-based computing facilities has emerged as AI’s rapid expansion creates demands for computing power and cooling that challenge traditional land-based data centres, prompting cloud computing companies to explore alternative solutions.What Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk said about AI data centres in spaceIn a recent Dwarkesh podcast, Musk said that the cheapest place to deploy AI would be in space. He suggested that this could happen within “36 months or less. Maybe 30 months.” Citing limits on terrestrial power generation, Musk argued that it is “harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space”. He said space-based solar panels offer “about five times the effectiveness” because there is no “day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere.”He added that “the atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy” and that batteries would not be needed for these data centres, as they’ll be solar-powered. Discussing hardware, Musk noted that once GPUs pass early testing, “they’re quite reliable past a certain point.”In a recent Fox News interview, Pichai discussed Google’s plans to begin testing space-based data centres in 2027, with the goal of positioning computing infrastructure closer to the sun for better energy access.“At Google, we are always proud of taking moon shots," Pichai said. He noted that “one of our moon shots is how do we one day have data centres in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun?”He revealed that the company wants to “put these data centres in space closer to the sun” and will take a “first step in 2027.” “We'll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there. But there's no doubt to me that a decade or so away will be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centres,” he explained.Apart from SpaceX and Google, several startups are developing designs for space-based data centres. The company claim that these data centres will address challenges faced by land-based facilities, including heat management. Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Bezos, is also exploring the concept, Reuters reported.