Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX and his artificial intelligence start-up xAI are reportedly mulling a merger, a move that would bring SpaceX’s rockets and its satellite Internet subsidiary Starlink under a single umbrella with xAI—which oversees the social media platform X and the chatbot Grok.
The two wings of Musk’s sprawling tech empire could merge ahead of a plan to take SpaceX public later this year, according to Reuters, which cited an anonymous source and recent company filings. SpaceX’s initial public offering could see the company valued at $1.5 trillion, according to the Financial Times. A merger with xAI could boost Musk’s plan to use SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship rocket to launch orbital AI data centers, experts have speculated.
Musk and other AI leaders are increasingly bullish on space as an answer to all the problems with data centers: Though costly to build and expensive to power, increasingly sprawling data centers are central to many AI company’s growth strategies. If the demand for AI continues to grow, earthbound data centers—and power supplies—may not be able to keep up. Data centers in orbit, however, would have practically unlimited access to solar energy—although such hardware would also come with its limits.
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SpaceX and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.