'Wasting billions': Jeff Bezos calls out AI firms over private data centers
Amazon's Jeff Bezos thinks AI companies are wasting billions by building their own data centers.
Speaking at the 2026 New York Times DealBook Summit, he compared this to old factories making their own electricity before power grids existed.
He says this approach won't last, and sees the future in shared cloud services like AWS.
Why energy is the real bottleneck
Bezos pointed out, "Energy—not chips—is the constraint for AI."
Data centers are already using huge amounts of power—expected to more than double worldwide by 2030, hitting levels close to all of Japan's energy use.
In the US, they could eat up 12% of national electricity by then.
Just one ChatGPT question takes almost 10 times more energy than a Google search.
What's next?
Looking ahead, Bezos imagines massive space-based data centers powered by solar energy within 20 years.
Meanwhile, big tech players like Meta and Alphabet are investing heavily in nuclear and renewable power to keep up with AI's growing appetite for energy.