“Elon Musk said SpaceX has acquired xAI, a deal that combines his powerful rocket-and-satellite business with his artificial intelligence startup that is facing steep competition.
SpaceX confirmed the deal Monday, posting a memo Musk sent out about the arrangement on its website.
"SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth," Musk, the top executive at both companies, wrote.
The combination brings together a mature and dominant company in SpaceX with one that is in a nascent stage. SpaceX operates a fleet of reusable rockets, spacecraft that ferry astronauts to orbit and Starlink, the world's largest satellite fleet, which provides broadband internet to millions of customers worldwide.
Musk's xAI, like other artificial-intelligence companies, is training large-language models and runs Grok, a chatbot integrated into the X social-media platform. XAI is facing formidable competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and others.
SpaceX was one of xAI's first customers when it was getting off the ground back in 2024, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. In one of its first integrations, xAI was used to power customer-support features for SpaceX's Starlink internet service.
The Journal reported last week that the companies were planning the tie-up, and other news organizations reported on discussions about the deal. Financial terms of the agreement weren't disclosed in the memo.
The combined company is valued at $1.25 trillion, people familiar with the matter said. Bloomberg earlier reported on the valuation.
Combining SpaceX and xAI is the latest example of Musk bringing different parts of his business empire together. Electric-car maker Tesla in 2016 acquired Musk's SolarCity business. Last year, Musk merged xAI with X, which he acquired when it was called Twitter.
SpaceX previously invested $2 billion into xAI, and last week Tesla committed to invest the same amount in the company.
The merger revealed Monday is structured as a share exchange, according to a copy of an email viewed by The Journal that was sent to current and former X and xAI employees. Shares in xAI will be converted into 0.1433 shares of SpaceX stock. Employees will have the option to cash out and sell their xAI shares back to the company, the email said.
People close to SpaceX have been discussing the prospects of the merger in recent days, including the risks and opportunities it may present as SpaceX prepares to go public.
Musk controlled both private companies prior to their combination. He held a roughly 42% ownership stake in SpaceX and 80% control over voting stock at the rocket maker.
The valuations in both companies have been steadily climbing in connection with secondary stock sales and efforts to raise fresh capital. Shares of SpaceX were valued at almost $527 each on Monday, people familiar with the matter said. In December, SpaceX began a secondary stock sale that sought to value the shares at $421, yielding a roughly $800 billion valuation.
XAI last month closed a $20 billion funding round. The Journal reported recently that the company was seeking to secure a $230 billion valuation.
Musk, in his memo, touted his vision of putting rockets, satellites, AI and more into one company and said that global electricity demand for AI can't be met with data centers on the ground without big impacts on communities and the environment. Advancing the technology, he wrote, will require equipment in space. Using solar power from space will be a transformative boost for the computing resources needed for AI, Musk said.
On Friday, SpaceX said in a U.S. regulatory filing it wants to deploy an orbital network with up to one million satellites to power AI data centers.
XAI, meanwhile, has struggled to attract as many enterprise customers and individual users as competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It has also found itself embroiled in controversies, most recently the dissemination of sexualized images of users produced without their consent.” [1]
1. Musk's SpaceX Acquires His xAI Startup --- Billionaire says he seeks to propel race for AI energy using space-based tech. Maidenberg, Micah. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Feb 2026: A1.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą