SpaceX and xAI Merge to Build the Future of AI in Space

SpaceX and xAI Combine Ahead of a Potential IPO

SpaceX is likely to soon become one of the world’s most popular companies among investors, at least as soon as it does its IPO, rumored to be scheduled for mid-2026. So far, SpaceX’s valuation mostly relied on its impressive feat in reusable rockets, as well as the associated first-of-a-kind Internet broadband network Starlink, which has generated for the company much-needed recurring commercial cash flow independent from defense and NASA contracts.

But it seems that SpaceX will now be a lot more closely associated with Elon Musk’s other venture, with the announced merger with xAI, the AI company that also owns X.com (formerly known as Twitter).

The news has set a massive wave of discussions and rumors to explain the rationale behind that move, from orbital data centers to future robotics space exploration and lunar & Martian colonies. And of course, one of the world’s largest companies, Tesla, is brought into these speculations as well.

The tone was equally enthusiastic from Musk himself, speaking like a character straight out of a science-fiction novel:

“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

xAI + SpaceX: What We Know So Far

Background

It was announced in a SpaceX blog post penned by Elon Musk that SpaceX has acquired xAI with the stated goal to:

“Form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”

xAI is Elon Musk’s AI company, which itself acquired X.com from Musk in 2025 in an all-stock deal valued at $33B.

xAI has built its own large language models (Grok series), which were integrated into X in 2023. The generative AI chatbot was designed to be “edgy” (in Musk’s own words) and answer questions with a bit of wit. Grok is known to use X as a primary source of information and news, leveraging the massive treasure trove of data that is the website.

xAI also constructed in record time (122 days) “Colossus,” which became operational in 2024 as the world’s largest AI supercomputer.

In March 2025, xAI acquired Hotshot, a startup focusing on video generation tools. It also introduced DeeperSearch for advanced web exploration and Grokipedia, an AI-powered alternative to Wikipedia.

By The Numbers

The news of the merger with SpaceX comes just a few days after xAI raised $20B in a Series E fundraising, which we now can imagine provided some selected investors an opportunity to access SpaceX and helped alleviate any internal opposition to the move among xAI shareholders (with SpaceX being fully controlled by Musk).

The recent fundraising had made xAI’s valuation at around $200B. This merger seems to value xAI at around $250B: investors in xAI will receive 0.1433 shares of SpaceX for every share of xAI as part of the acquisition. Some xAI executives may also opt for cash instead of SpaceX stock at $75.46 per share.

The combined company of SpaceX and xAI is expected to price shares at about $527 each.

The deal reportedly would value the combined company at $1.25T to $1.5T, confirming the estimated value of SpaceX around a trillion or more, which would be massive for a still privately listed company. For reference, Tesla, one of the world’s largest companies, is valued at $1.32T.

This would also make the merger the world’s largest M&A deal, a distinction held until now for more than 25 years when Vodafone bought Germany’s Mannesmann for $203B.

Why Now? Toward Space-Based AI

Solving The AI Energy Conundrum

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The merger has a clear goal: orbital AI data centers, where each of the two companies brings its own expertise.

The key reasoning is that AI data centers are now constrained not by human or computing resources, but by energy supply.

Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling.

Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.

So for Musk, ever the science & tech enthusiast, the solution is simply to leave Earth to find unlimited, abundant energy.

In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. To harness even a millionth of our Sun’s energy would require over a million times more energy than our civilization currently uses!

So the solution would be orbital data centers, a topic we recently explored in more detail in “Space-Based AI: The Next Frontier for Cloud Scale.”

Millions Of Satellites

The scale of the infrastructure envisioned by Musk dwarfs anything ever launched into space. We are talking of a million satellites operating as a giant data center.

It’s always sunny in space!

Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.

The Kardashev is a science concept that classifies civilizations according to how much of the energy of its star it harvests, with Kardashev I using all the sunlight reaching a planet, and Kardashev II all of the Sun’s output.

Source: Aye Universe

This is not totally out of the blue, as the Starlink constellation already broke all records by being the majority of all satellites in orbit around the Earth and more than all satellites ever launched before 2021 combined.

The network also helped SpaceX generate an $8B profit in 2025.

Source: ARK Invest

Still, from 10,000 satellites to a million, this is a 100x jump. The only possible way it could work is with a massive fleet of Starships, the latest rocket of SpaceX that just finished successful testing without exploding last year.

“This year, Starship will begin delivering the much more powerful V3 Starlink satellites to orbit, with each launch adding more than 20 times the capacity to the constellation as the current Falcon launches of the V2 Starlink satellites.“

And ARK Invest just released that they think that AI data centers could grow the demand for orbital launch 11x compared to the full Starlink constellation for a 10GW.

Source: ARK Invest

Does It Make Sense?

The one million satellite mark is also not so outlandish when compared to the recent application by China to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) for 200,000 satellites for its own version of Starlink.

Overall, the target seems to be a Starship launch every hour, each carrying 200 tons per flight, so that Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year.

Musk’s target is also a lot more ambitious than what ARK Invest imagined, as he is talking of 10x more computing power, which would therefore theoretically multiply demand for SpaceX rockets’ capacity by 600x.

“The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs.

Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.”

The timeline is, however, highly optimistic, which will not surprise anyone who has even superficially followed Elon Musk’s career. It tends to deliver more than previously thought possible, but rarely on time. So his time frame should likely be judged as an ambitious target more than a real promise. But still, this could mean we may see the first orbital data center being launched by 2030 or not long after.

“My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.”

The Even Bigger Picture

Tesla

Of course, the other major company of Elon Musk’s business empire is Tesla. And it seems that the company is also moving beyond its original roots.

At the end of January 2026, Tesla announced it would stop the production of some of its cars, the models S & X, and the factory would be retooled to produce its line of humanoid robots Optimus.

“From a portfolio and focus standpoints, it makes sense to drop them and concentrate on higher-volume products like the Model 3 and Model Y, along with other business expansion bets.”

Jessica Caldwell, Head of Insights at Edmunds.

At the same time, it was announced that Tesla had invested $2B in xAI, which would now be turned into SpaceX shares instead, with Tesla owning a little less than 1% of xAI (and therefore around 0.2% of SpaceX post-merger).

Of course, production of Optimus and quickly expanding plans for robotaxis are both tightly linked to AI capacity, leading many to estimate that a Tesla-SpaceX merger would make a lot of sense.

As SpaceX and Tesla are now valued at similar market capitalization, this would also be more of a merger between equals. And the dual potential of xAI in both orbital data center and for the “brains” of Optimus robots and Tesla robotaxis would be the junction between the so-far-unrelated business of space rocketry and electric cars.

One last potential synergy is in Tesla providing the orbital datacenters with the solar panels and batteries they will need. At least before even more ambitious infrastructure projects in deep space (see below).

The potential merger with Tesla will be more complex, as it not only could raise even more questions from regulators than the xAI + SpaceX merger, but it could also face serious opposition from some of Tesla’s shareholders. After all, turning an automotive company into a robotic + solar + AI + spacetech company is a radical change.

But this seems like the logical step to consolidate into one company Musk’s empire, and build a coherent, futuristic megacorporation embracing all at once AI, green energy, and space colonization.

And the last piece of the puzzle is the potential $1T pay package to Elon Musk by Tesla, which will happen only with very massive success for the company:

• Tesla’s market cap rising to $8.5 trillion.
• Delivering 20 million vehicles, 1 million robotaxis, 1 million Optimus robots.
• Achieving $400 billion in adjusted EBITDA.

Which is exactly what could happen if the company becomes a fully fledged futuristic EV & AI & robotic company. With xAI now merged into SpaceX, only a merger with the space activity seems to be able to make it happen.

(You can also read our investment report on Tesla for more details about the company’s plan for robotaxis and Optimus robots)

Musk’s Other Companies

Musk has also been active with the brain-chip maker Neuralink and the tunnel firm The Boring Company.

Neuralink could likely be incorporated in xAI activity, and provide extra insight on intelligence and on a new interface to interact with AI, as well as AI + neural implants medical applications.

The Boring Company is not very clearly linked to either Space, AI, or even electric cars (beyond some traffic tunnels), except when taking into account an even more ambitious step in Musk’s plans.

For example, boring tunnels will be essential to build habitats on the Moon and Mars, to shield their inhabitants from cosmic radiation. Neuralink to control Optimus or other machines on the Moon might also be in the works.

Moon, Mars & Beyond

It is no secret that Elon Musk’s ultimate goal is to make “humankind a multiplanetary species,” an overreaching goal that he has repeated endlessly over the past decade.

Years before the AI boom, this was the rationale for creating SpaceX in the first place, and the super-heavy launcher Starship in particular. This will be crucial to reach and establish a permanent human presence on both the Moon (the Artemis missions) and Mars.

“While launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship’s capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon.

Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits.”

For a long time, Musk had mostly ambitions to skip the Moon, except for the occasional lucrative lunar mission funded by NASA, and go to Mars directly. He seems to have radically changed his perspective on the matter, as there is now a need for a massive amount of material to be manufactured and then put into Earth’s orbit.

The Moon, being airless and with just 1/6 of Earth’s gravity, sending material into space from it is rather trivial compared to launching a Starship from Earth. Musk himself laid out the long-term plan:

“Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space.

By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale, and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power.”

(This is exactly the type of space-based economy that we previously explored in several articles like “Space Infrastructure – Building Stairways To The Heavens”, “The Future Space-Based Economy“, and “To The Moon And Mars – Mapping The New Space Race”.)

One such infrastructure to produce solar power on the Moon is in place + mass drivers, we could also likely see mass unlimited supply of solar power coming from space, as we explored in “Space Based Energy Solutions For Endless Clean Energy“.

The Heinlein Connection

It is now very clear that Musk sees himself as the real-life version of the main character of Heinlein’s science fiction book “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” often less discussed than the rest of the author’s work like Starship Troopers or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

In this book, Delos D. Harriman is a businessman who is determined to personally reach and control the Moon. To do so, he uses any possible tricks and legal ways to achieve his goal, in a push to both enrich himself and propel humanity into a new golden age, with the second goal, allegedly, his true motivation.

Conclusion

Time will tell, but it seems that the merger of xAI & SpaceX is likely just the first step of a slowly unfolding plan by Elon Musk to bring into a coherent whole all of his business ventures into one joint company.

Logically, we could see The Boring Company and Neuralink folded into xAI/SpaceX soon, ahead of a SpaceX IPO.

Once this is out of the way, we could see two options forward for the final Tesla + SpaceX merger:

• A friendly merger if Tesla’s shareholders vote in favor of the idea.
• A hostile takeover by SpaceX if the company has enough money from its IPO to pull off what would be the largest financial move of this kind ever performed.

In any case, there is one thing we can be certain of: SpaceX and Tesla will stay in the tech and financial headlines and at the center of hotly debated speculations and arguments throughout 2026 and beyond. And for most investors, at least until the SpaceX IPO, the best way to get exposure to the future Musk envisions is likely to be through Tesla shares.

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