Amazon eyes Chile skies in bid to data mine the stars
The technology could also be applied to medicine and banking to spot anomalies in large datasets, writes Cassandra Garrison
Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by that country’s giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools. The talks are aimed at fuelling growth in Amazon’s cloud computing business in Latin America and boosting its data processing capabilities. President Sebastian Pinera’s centre-right government, which is seeking to wean Chile’s $325bn economy from reliance on copper mining, announced last week that it plans to pool data from all its telescopes onto a virtual observatory stored in the cloud, without giving a timeframe. The government talked of the potential for astrodata innovation but did not give details and did not comment on companies that might host astrodata in the computing cloud. Amazon executives have been holding discussions with the Chilean government for two years about a possible data centre to provide infrastructure for firms and for its government to store ...
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