Artificial intelligence's appetite for power is running up against a hard constraint: there is not enough land, energy, or grid capacity to build data centers fast enough on the ground. Space is the proposed fix, but Jeff Bezos, the person perhaps most invested in making it happen, is tempering expectations.

"Some of the timelines we hear are very short," he told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin. "People would talk about two or three years. That's probably a little ambitious."

Until chip costs fall enough to free up room in data center budgets, and until launch costs drop to a level where putting hardware in orbit becomes economically defensible, the case for space-based infrastructure remains compelling in theory but difficult in practice.

Orbital data centers draw on continuous solar energy and sidestep the land-use and grid-access problems throttling terrestrial expansion but those advantages only pencil out at price points the industry has not yet reached.

However, Bezos isn’t going to wait until the economics fall into place to stake his position. In March, Blue Origin submitted proposals to the FCC to launch 51,600 data center satellites into low Earth orbit as part of Project Sunrise.

These satellites will work within the context of TeraWave, Blue Origin’s planned satellite connectivity network, which the firm hopes to begin deployment of by the fourth quarter of 2027 at the latest. Blue Origin isn’t the only company that sees orbital assets as a viable short-term opportunity. In February, Musk stated that creating space-based data centers was the chief reason behind merging SpaceX and xAI.