Elon Musk has done it again: he has changed one of his companies from the right pocket to the left. In 2016, when his company Solar City was in the doldrums, he took advantage of the fact that Tesla was going like a rocket to save the company. Now it is xAI that needs a push in the age of artificial intelligence and, after a few brief rumorsconfirmation came: SpaceX has purchased xAI. Or what is the same: an Elon Musk company has bought another Elon Musk company.
It’s an ideal move, but also a morrocotudo mess.
In short. The announcement came late into our night. As part of a vertical integration, aerospace will absorb the operations of xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. It was an extremely rare agreement. When it occurs a business purchasewe know the numbers, but here we only have some ideas about the goal.
Musk has been deliberately opaque and has justified the movement as a restructuring to guarantee “freedom of expression”, with a story based on energy, the development of technology and something we have been talking about for some time: the need for exploit outer space as a source of energy and giant heatsink for the increasingly numerous data centers.
One million satellites. In fact, the operation came shortly after we learned that SpaceX had filed with the US FCC a project to launch one million Starlink satellites. Currently, there are about 9,000, plus another few thousand companies like Amazon or chinese satellites and Europeans…and astronomers are already complaining about how difficult it is to observe beyond low orbit.
With a million satellites from SpaceX alone, the amount of potential space debris will increase stratospherically, but Starlink is not a simple satellite system to have Internet anywhere on the planet: They are potential data centers. Musk himself, when companies like amazon either Google They began to be very vocal about the need for moving data centers into spacepointed out that SpaceX already had them and that it was easy to convert its satellites into computing centers.
In space there is Unlimited, uninterrupted energyheat dissipation is much simpler because air or water is not needed as on Earth and the information is transmitted to terrestrial centers using lasers, eliminating the need for Expensive fiber optic interconnections.
SpaceX works. And, in Musk’s statement, it is stated that this demand for energy and computing power to feed AI is almost impossible to cover with terrestrial solutions, so the most logical thing is the space exodus from data centers. And, of course, one plus one equals two: SpaceX has the infrastructure and xAI needs it.
But beyond the synergy, there is another reality. SpaceX has become a solid and profitable company. It is the only one that, right now, can routinely transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. It has become an essential piece for both NASA and the Department of Defense and, in addition, it has the aforementioned Starlink system that has crept in, perhaps too much, into the communications infrastructure of countries like Ukraine.
xAI burns money. On the other hand, xAI shows the symptoms of a company focused on artificial intelligence. This valued at more than $230 billion and has raised several tens of billions in several rounds of financing, but is burning money at a rate of approximately one billion a month.
This is typical, as we say, of companies in the growth phase, and the executives themselves have stated that they have plans and resources to keep spending aggressively, but everything has a limit. xAI requires enormous amounts of energy, resources, computing and is developing its own chips. All of that costs money, and putting data centers in space with existing infrastructure like Starlink’s can help ease the burden.
In the economic and energy sense, it is a brilliant operation. When other technology companies want to start filling the space with their data centers, SpaceX will already be there.
Morrocotudo mess. Therefore, and in the end, what Musk has done is unite a company in an aggressive investment phase with another that is solid and has established contacts with the US government. SpaceX is the highest xAI carrying vehicle and it looks like a win-win manual. Now, it’s also a tremendous mess.
Because xAI is not just xAI: it is (Twitter), and now SpaceX has all that power under one umbrella. xAI manages military intelligence and we have already mentioned that Ukraine threw itself into the arms of Starlinkrelying on its infrastructure during the conflict with Russia. SpaceX is no longer just an aerospace company, it is that and much more: a brain, a social network with private data of tens of millions of people.
And in a Europe that is fighting for their technological sovereignty and information protection, SpaceX can go from being a partner for a specific mission to something to look askance at.
Image | The White House (edited)
In Xataka | From $100 billion romance to silent divorce: NVIDIA and OpenAI’s relationship is disintegrating
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings