Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has applied to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites.

A Thursday filing argues that the US Federal Communications Commission should approve Blue Origin’s plans because “insatiable demand for AI workloads” means orbiting servers represent “a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints.”

Blue Origin also argues that datacenters in space will “enable U.S. companies developing and using AI to flourish, accelerating breakthroughs in machine learning, autonomous systems, and predictive analytics in support of broad societal benefit.”

But the company says it will be hard to build all the AI infrastructure we need on Earth.

“Space-based datacenters can help break this bottleneck,” the company claims. “The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs, and nonexistent grid infrastructure disparities, fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity ...