Musk’s mega-merger of SpaceX and xAI bets on sci-fi future of data centers in space
BNN Bloomberg
Seventy-five years ago, the idea of harnessing the power of the skies was little more than fantasy spun by futurists like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Elon Musk’s mega-merger of his companies xAI and SpaceX this week brings this sci-fi dream a step closer.
NASA engineers and technologists have speculated for nearly two decades about moving energy‑hungry computing off the planet. More recently, the idea has captured the attention of Big Tech including Alphabet and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The physics made sense, the solar energy was abundant. Still, the challenges seemed insurmountable.
Musk, though, known for betting on seemingly far-out theories and getting them to work, may finally be laying the groundwork to make data centers in space a reality. He is armed with the world’s busiest satellite launch fleet, an AI startup, and an appetite for infrastructure that stretches from Earth to vacuum.
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk said on Monday. “To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses! The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space.”
The merger sharpens investor focus on how he might overcome big hurdles through a tightly woven ecosystem of rockets, satellites and AI systems, to take AI infrastructure beyond Earth. It comes just as SpaceX is preparing for a potential $1.5 trillion IPO.
SpaceX has sought permission to launch up to 1 million solar‑powered satellites engineered as orbital data centers, far beyond anything currently deployed or proposed. In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX describes a solar‑powered, optical‑link‑driven “orbital data-center system,” though it did not say how many Starship launches would be required to scale the space data-center network to an operational degree.
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