TURIN, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Amazon ( AMZN ) founder and

executive chair Jeff Bezos said on Friday gigawatt-scale data

centres will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years,

predicting they would eventually outperform Earth-based ones

thanks to the abundance of uninterrupted solar energy.

The number of these enormous centres, which store computing

infrastructure, is growing exponentially as the world

increasingly uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing,

driving a surge in demand for electricity and water to cool

their servers.

"One of the things that's going to happen in the next - it's

hard to know exactly when, it's 10 plus years, and I bet it's

not more than 20 years - we're going to start building these

giant gigawatt data centres in space," Bezos said during a

fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis ( STLA )

Chairman John Elkann at the Italian Tech Week in Turin.

The concept of space-based data centres is gaining traction

among large tech companies, as the energy needs to maintain such

operations on Earth are growing sharply.

"These giant training clusters, those will be better built

in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7. There are no

clouds and no rain, no weather," Bezos said. "We will be able to

beat the cost of terrestrial data centres in space in the next

couple of decades."

Bezos said the shift to orbital infrastructure is part of a

broader trend of using space to improve life on Earth.

"It already has happened with weather satellites. It has

already happened with communication satellites. The next step is

going to be data centres and then other kinds of manufacturing,"

he said.

However, hosting data centres in space has its own

challenges, including cumbersome maintenance, limited scope for

upgrades and high costs of launching rockets as well as the risk

of failed rocket launches.