SpaceX and xAI evaluate merger: Musk aims for data centres in orbit

A deal to bring together SpaceX's rockets, Starlink's satellites, the social X platform and the chatbot Grok Ai within the same group. This is the merger that SpaceX and xAi, Elon Musk's company, are working on.

This news had been anticipated by Reuters, which mentions some company documents, and is now also confirmed by sources in the Wall Street Journal, according to which SpaceX managers have already started informing some investors of the plans under consideration.

The plan would give new impetus to SpaceX's efforts to launch data centres into orbit, as Musk fights for supremacy in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence race against tech giants such as Google, Meta and OpenAI.

Speaking at Davos, in fact, Musk said that 'the cheapest place to install artificial intelligence will be in space. And that will happen within two years, maybe three at the most'.

Space-based artificial intelligence computing, powered by solar energy, aims to reduce the cost of generating the computing power needed to run and train artificial intelligence models such as xAI's Grok. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin announced a new high-capacity backbone network composed of thousands of satellites, while Google is studying space data centres with its Project Suncatcher.