TURIN (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.

(Reporting by Elvira Pollina and Giulio Piovaccari; Writing by Elvira Pollina; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)