There's a complaint in Operations Research StackExchange that CONOPT-for-AMPL does not recognize requests for very large amounts of memory:
https://or.stackexchange.com/questions/12979/assigning-memory-to-conopt-in-ampl-for-solving-a-large-model
According to the user, the "CONOPT space" message says:
workmeg=100000 gives 0.76 Mbytes
workmeg=100000000 gives 762.94 Mbytes
workmeg=10000000000 gives 8191.00 Mbytes