Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos offered at the tenth edition of VivaTech (Paris, 2026) a vision that transcends e-commerce and the cloud: turning the Moon into a permanent industrial platform to alleviate ecological pressure on Earth. Before an audience of nearly 200,000 attendees from 170 countries, Bezos outlined a roadmap combining reusable rockets, artificial intelligence, and a business philosophy reminiscent of Amazon's early days.

Back to the Moon, but to Stay

Bezos was direct: “It’s time to go back to the moon. This time to stay.” Unlike the Apollo missions, which he called expensive and inefficient, his goal is to establish a permanent lunar presence. The key is to lower the cost of access to space through reusable rockets and mass production, a model Blue Origin already applies. “Space travel is a solved problem. What we’re trying to do is make it profitable,” he stated.

The magnate described a virtuous cycle: cheaper launches → more satellites → more demand → more practice → even lower costs. It’s the same pattern that democratized the internet and, according to Bezos, will allow “two kids in a college dorm” to found the next great space company.

The Moon as a Logistics Base and Ecological Salvation

For Bezos, the Moon is not a destination but an industrial base. Its low gravity (1/6 of Earth’s) reduces by up to 28 times the energy needed to send materials into space. Additionally, its poles contain water ice that can be converted into oxygen and hydrogen, i.e., fuel. “The Moon is a gift,” he said.

The most ambitious proposal was to move heavy industries (manufacturing, data centers, energy production) off the planet. “We can have progress and conservation; we don’t have to give up either,” he explained. If heavy industry operates in space using extraterrestrial resources, Earth could become a high-value ecological reserve, restoring pre-industrial environmental levels.

AI and the Future of Work: Augment, Not Replace

Bezos also addressed artificial intelligence, moving away from alarmism. “AI will expand our ability to detect problems, generate solutions, and accelerate the invention cycle,” he argued. He acknowledged the power of LLMs to manipulate symbols and write code, but pointed out their limitation: they don’t understand the physical world like an engineer. “Reading a thousand books on gymnastics doesn’t make anyone a gymnast,” he exemplified.

He presented Prometheus, a system to accelerate design and manufacturing, drastically reducing the time between imagining something and building it. The true frontier, he said, is not technological but imaginative. In this context, document automation with OCR, AI, and human validation (how to approach it well) and observability for processes (what to watch and alert) are examples of how AI is already transforming business operations.

Fast Decisions and Startup Culture

Bezos recalled his two-door theory: type 1 decisions (irreversible, slow) and type 2 decisions (reversible, fast). The mistake of many large corporations is to treat everything as type 1. “The aerospace sector is especially stuck in that bureaucracy,” he criticized. He called for less “glacial speed” and more startup mentality, an approach also applicable when measuring whether an automation truly saves time or choosing between classic RPA vs API-first workflows.

Resourcefulness: The 21st Century Skill

The speech closed with an inspirational message: the ability to be resourceful (ingenious, resourceful, self-sufficient) is the most valuable quality. Bezos learned it fixing machinery on a Texas ranch with his grandfather. “Any problem is solvable, as long as you start believing it is. If you start with the opposite idea, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he concluded.

For IT professionals, this vision connects with the need to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement and proactive security, as in configuring secure VPNs and firewalls or ethical hacking and penetration testing. The Moon and AI are just the next step in a trajectory that began with the cloud and automation.

Original source: ComputerWorld. Analysis and adaptation by ForgeNEX.