As Google’s Project Suncatcher, which was announced recently, aims to put AI data centers around the Earth’s orbit, attention comes to billionaire entrepreneur and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who had expressed similar ambitions almost a year ago, calling for humanity to relocate heavy industry and infrastructure, including energy-intensive factories and data centers, off-planet to preserve Earth.
Speaking previously at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos highlighted the deteriorating state of the environment despite human progress in almost every other metric. “Almost everything is better today than it was,” Bezos said, “except the environment.”
With global oceans, forests, and ecosystems under stress, the Amazon founder stressed the unique importance of our home planet. “There is no Plan B. We have to save Earth,” he insisted. Bezos says that the solution is not to halt innovation, but to create an orbital and lunar infrastructure that allows human progress to continue without overwhelming the planet’s capacity.
Bezos called for space-based IT infrastructure
Bezos, who founded the space company Blue Origin, believes that Earth should eventually be reserved primarily for human life, while high-impact industrial activities are shifted to the Moon and orbiting space stations. This off-world infrastructure would allow industries to directly harness the sun’s energy, bypassing Earth’s limited resources.
This vision is already being explored by other tech giants. Last week, Google announced its Project Suncatcher, a “moonshot” idea to test the feasibility of running AI data centers in orbit. Companies like Starcloud, Lonestar Data Systems, and Axiom Space are also actively developing plans to build power and data infrastructure beyond our atmosphere to meet the continuous, energy-demanding needs of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Bezos remains confident in this interstellar future, predicting a major human expansion off-world. Speaking at Italian Tech Week last month, he stated that millions of people could be living in space by the 2040s, with AI systems and robots handling the bulk of off-planet industrial work. This future, in his view, is not an escape, but a necessary and optimistic expansion of the human domain.
