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SpaceX has officially acquired Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, creating a combined entity valued at $1.25 trillion. The primary goal of this merger is to develop data centers in space, addressing the limitations and environmental concerns of terrestrial AI infrastructure.
AI 生成摘要
SpaceX 已正式收購由 Elon Musk 創立的人工智能公司 xAI，合併後的公司估值達 1.25 兆美元。此次合併的主要目標是在太空建立數據中心，以解決現有地面人工智能基礎設施的局限性和環境問題。
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SpaceX has acquired Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, creating the world’s most valuable private company, the spaceflight company announced Monday.
Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, wrote in a memo posted to the rocket company’s website that the merger is largely about creating space-based data centers — an idea he has become fixated on over the last few months.
“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,” he wrote. (xAI has been accused of imposing some of that hardship on the communities near its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee.)
The tie-up values the combined company at $1.25 trillion, according to Bloomberg News, which was first to report the completed deal. SpaceX has been reportedly preparing an IPO for as early as June of this year. It’s unclear whether the merger will affect that timeline. Musk did not address the IPO in his public memo.
The merger brings together two of Musk’s companies, each with its own financial challenges. xAI is currently burning around $1 billion per month, according to Bloomberg. SpaceX, meanwhile, generates as much as 80% of its revenue from launching its own Starlink satellites, according to Reuters. Last year, xAI acquired X, the social media company also owned by Musk, with Musk claiming a combined company valuation of $113 billion.
Musk wrote in his memo that it will take a constant stream of many — although he did not specify how many — satellites to create these space-based data centers, ensuring that SpaceX will have an even-larger constant stream of revenue for the foreseeable future. (That revenue loop likely looks even more attractive when you consider that satellites are required to be de-orbited every five years by the Federal Communications Commission.)
While space data centers may be the stated goal, SpaceX and xAI have very different near-term objectives.
SpaceX is currently trying to prove that its Starship rocket is capable of bringing astronauts to the moon and Mars, while xAI is competing with leading artificial intelligence companies like Google and OpenAI. The pressure on xAI is so great, the Washington Post reported Monday, that Musk loosened restrictions on the company’s chatbot Grok — which contributed to it becoming a tool for making AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery of adults and children.
Musk is also the head of Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Tesla and SpaceX previously invested $2 billion each in xAI.
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Sr. Reporter, Transportation
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
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