The Birth of the "Muskonomy": SpaceX Acquires xAI to Launch AI Data Centres in Space

Elon Musk has merged his AI company xAI with SpaceX and unveiled plans to deploy AI data centres and satellites in orbit. The move could redefine how artificial intelligence is trained, powered, and scaled beyond Earth.

Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI is joining forces with SpaceX, marking one of the boldest experiments in combining AI and space technology. The announcement signals Musk’s ambition to take artificial intelligence beyond Earth’s surface.

Musk revealed that the merged effort will focus on deploying AI infrastructure in space, including solar-powered data centres and AI-enabled satellites. He described the idea as a long-term solution to energy constraints and scaling challenges faced by AI on Earth.

This development matters because it could fundamentally change where and how large AI models are trained, processed, and deployed—especially as demand for compute power continues to surge globally.

The SpaceX-xAI merger shows how data science and artificial intelligence are moving toward massive, autonomous systems operating at planetary scale. Training AI models in space requires expertise in distributed data systems, energy-efficient AI, and agentic AI, where systems operate independently with minimal human intervention. Courses focused on data science, advanced AI and agent-based systems directly align with the skills needed to build, monitor and govern such next-generation AI infrastructure.

The Strategic Blueprint: Solving Earth's AI Energy Crisis

The SpaceX-xAI merger follows a massive FCC filing to launch up to one million satellites designed to function as floating supercomputers.

Why Space? The Three Core Advantages

• Unfiltered Solar Power: In space, solar panels are 5x more effective than on Earth. There is no night cycle, no weather, and no atmospheric attenuation, providing a constant stream of 100% renewable energy.
• Passive Radiative Cooling: The 3 Kelvin (-270°C) vacuum of space acts as a natural refrigerator. By pointing radiators away from the sun, data centers can dissipate heat effortlessly without using a single drop of water.
• Infinite Scalability: Orbital paths provide effectively infinite "real estate" for growth, far beyond the land limits and "NIMBY" opposition facing ground-based facilities in places like Memphis or Texas.

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The "Starship" Forcing Function

SpaceX's Starship V3 is the only vehicle capable of making this vision affordable.

• Payload: 200 tons per flight, 20x the capacity of current Falcon 9 rockets.
• Cost: Targeted at under $100 per pound, making space freight cheaper than aircraft freight.
• Frequency: A planned "shuttle service" of one flight per hour ensures a continuous build-out of the orbital mesh.

From Earth to the Moon: The Long-Term Roadmap

Musk's vision extends far beyond Low Earth Orbit, looking toward lunar manufacturing and deep-space compute.

• Lunar Mass Drivers: SpaceX plans to use lunar resources to manufacture AI satellites on the Moon, using electromagnetic "mass drivers" to launch them into deep space at a scale of 1,000 TW per year.
• Funding Mars: The massive revenue generated from Grok AI, Starlink, and orbital data centers is explicitly earmarked to fund the first human colonies on Mars.
• The "Muskonomy" Ecosystem: The merger pool capital, computing resources, and talent, integrating the real-time data from X (formerly Twitter) directly into the orbital "brains."

Conclusion

The SpaceX-xAI merger marks the end of the "terrestrial AI" era. By moving the world's heaviest workloads into orbit, Musk is attempting to de-risk humanity's future while securing total control over the most vital utility of the next century: intelligence. Whether this ambitious plan hits its "two-to-three-year" viability window or takes a decade, it has already redefined the global AI race as a contest of orbital logistics and energy sovereignty.