Elon Musk announces SpaceX’s acquisition of AI startup xAI

Elon Musk has revealed that SpaceX acquired the AI startup xAI successful a determination aimed astatine integrating its abstraction exploration and AI ventures.

The woody stands arsenic 1 of the astir important mergers wrong the exertion sector, aligning the renowned space-and-satellite institution with xAI, known for its Grok chatbot.

The merger could besides heighten SpaceX’s ambitions successful information centres arsenic Musk positions himself against cardinal competitors similar Google, Meta, Amazon-backed Anthropic, and OpenAI successful the burgeoning AI industry.

This woody values SpaceX astatine $1tn and xAI astatine $250bn, reported Reuters, citing an undisclosed root privy to the information. As portion of the agreement, investors successful xAI volition person 0.1433 shares of SpaceX for each stock they ain successful the AI start-up.

Additionally, immoderate xAI executives mightiness take to judge currency successful lieu of SpaceX banal astatine a complaint of $75.46 per share.

Another root indicated to the work that the combined company's shares are expected to beryllium priced astatine astir $527 each. SpaceX was antecedently valued astatine $800bn during an insider stock sale, maintaining its presumption arsenic the world's astir invaluable privately-held firm. The Wall Street Journal reported that xAI had a valuation of $230bn past November.

The merger occurs up of a planned nationalist offering by SpaceX that could worth the institution astatine implicit $1.5tn.

Last month, xAI secured $20bn done a Series E backing round, exceeding its archetypal people of $15bn. Proceeds from the circular volition beryllium allocated towards processing AI models and computing infrastructure, alongside supporting probe initiatives.

The money raising coincides with xAI's preparations to bid its next-generation Grok 5 model. The institution intends to usage the superior for expanding infrastructure and accelerating the deployment of AI products.

Musk described the merger arsenic forming "the astir ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation motor connected (and off) Earth," with plans for AI-driven applications alongside accepted abstraction technologies. He highlighted the necessity of space-based AI solutions owed to the important powerfulness demands of existent terrestrial information centres.

Furthermore, Musk highlighted that abstraction offers accordant star power, arsenic helium outlined plans for satellites to relation arsenic orbital information centres and lend to advancement towards a Kardashev II-level civilisation.

The Tesla CEO elaborate that launching respective satellites volition beryllium captious for extending Starship's capabilities and achieving predominant launches carrying important payloads. These efforts could perchance adhd 100 gigawatts (GW) of AI compute capableness annually without ongoing operational costs.