xAI joins SpaceX

This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.

What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.

I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.

I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.

One thing to keep in mind. xAI and SpaceX both have contracts with the DoD. So it makes sense he moved it there rather than Tesla. Not sure I buy the needing AI for doing more in space or if this is to save sinking ship, but if one of his two big companies needed to buy it to keep it afloat it makes sense it was SpaceX and not Tesla.

I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like

If investors are falling for it, I guess all we can hope for is that the government doesn't bail it out!

> buy a dying social network for 44bil

> merge it with a company created out of thin air for 20bil.

> have a third company buy it.

put it back on the market for 1.5 trillion.

Whenever computer chips go into space, they have to be hardened against radiation, because there is no atmosphere to protect them. Otherwise you get random bit flips.

This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are.

No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips.

(Although now it got me thinking, do random bit flips matter when training a trillion parameter model?)

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

I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi

Genuine question: is it even theoretically possible to find some way to dump the heat that would be generated by a "data center" in space?

> Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year

Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)

"Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization"

So, basically give ourselves Kessler syndrome. Or is Elon trying to monopolize orbit entirely?

In other words, he's cooking the books again.

People confuse being able to think big with being allowed to think big. With this much money loaned to him, protectionism and too many PR stunts, I don't think he delivered big enough, and he won't be able to at some point. This is madness.

So... Elon wants to literally build Skynet?

Is there anything substantially different about Google's announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813267 that makes it any more sane than the Space-X announcement?

Trails of those low orbit satellites wasn't bad enough.

Can't wait to see pictures of night sky ruined by... A data-center in the frame.

Didn’t Elon say that orbital solar collection was a stupid idea due to energy loss in transmission? Using AI as an almost proof-of-work shows that it may potentially be more complex problem than previously thought. If we threw Bitcoin miners up to those satellites you could literally beam money down.

Let's call it for what it is, a payday for Elon. Paper billionaires have figured out they cannot cash out with out tanking their paper, so now you have these circular deals to extract as much as possible. If we had a functioning government they would step in and put an immediate stop to this on national security grounds.

Elon investors should try buying a lottery ticket, it also lets you dream of the future while not providing returns.

Does this mean the foreign software engineers in xAI are now subject to ITAR?

Musk is moving value out of public hands and into his own. He overpaid $44B for Twitter, then rebranded it as an AI asset by folding X into xAI. He pushed Tesla to invest $2B of shareholder money into xAI despite shareholders voting no. Five days later, SpaceX acquired xAI, effectively turning Tesla’s cash into equity in a private company Musk owns far more of. Musk controlled every step, there was no real arm’s-length process, and he almost certainly knew the outcome in advance. Musk and his private investors get control, inflated valuations, and IPO upside. Tesla shareholders supply the cash, take the risk, and lose leverage.

I've yet to attain full-stack mastery in my job, but Musk has already attained capital stack mastery.

This is either insanely ambitious genius or pure shithousery. I guess we'll find out which one it is in 10 years

I suppose one of the ADR’s read something like “…who cares about bitflips, man. Isn’t AI all about probability?”

Knowing the insane level of hardening that goes into putting microcontrollers into space, how to the expect to use some 3nm process chip to stand a chance?

I don't see the demand for space being there, OSS is driving costs down and there are still plenty of hardware and algorithmic optimizations we haven't deployed yet.

Any details regarding valuations etc?

Just checking (genuine question) there wouldn't be a sneaky way to weaponize a million satellites in orbit around the Earth, would there? I can't imagine it wouldn't have ever been looked into.

I have so many conflicting thoughts that I cannot properly articulate yet. I can say though, this is not going to end well for most, it is clumsily premeditated and starting to feel like dude is just trying to be a Neal Stephenson character.

I will not be left holding this bag. This is such financial engineering nonsense, and if we had any sort of regulatory controls this would never be allowed to happen - especially BECAUSE of national security reasons.

This is terrible for Space-X. They're doing a great job. Musk has left running it to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Now Space-X has a AI business unit they don't need, a new money drain, and more attention from Musk.

Should have merged xAI into Twitter. A failure there would not be a major setback.

Banksters struggled to sell off Twitter notes. Did they get out intact finally?

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.

Do this math include the cost and weight of the radiators? Because it obviously can't work without big radiators, and I don't see them mentioned in the math?

What's to stop president AOC from pulling the clearances of everyone working for SpaceX?

This makes a lot of sense. The commercial launch business is not large enough to support all possible Falcon launches, so Starlink was created to take advantage of the low launch cost and vertical integration and is now a major profit center for SpaceX.

Starship launches are only going to make sense every 779.94 days (the approx 2 year Mars-Earth proximity). The rest of the time, the launches could similarly be used to deploy orbiting data centers for XAi/Grok etc. Brilliant move.

They both have X in their names, just imagine the synergies!

I hope all the Tesla shareholders understand that they’re about to get hosed.

Musks making Tesla seem like a good fit into the portfolio.

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

You know what's even harder to cool?

> Orbital Data Centers

I swear Prof G mentioned this exact same thing happening today

Has SpaceX figured something out related to photonic chips that dramatically reduces waste heat generation of compute?

The first M&A announcement I've seen in my entire life that includes a laughing emoji; maybe that's what it is!

I suspended my disbelief and gave it a chance but I couldn’t hold it anymore after the emoji.

Why?

I know that per HN's guidelines we're supposed to be "kind and curious", and "reply to the argument instead of calling names". But with some texts, engaging with individual arguments loses sight of the more important bigger picture. So while unkind, the most "thoughtful and substantive" thing I think can be said about this text is:

The man's a moron.

If Musk and SpaceX are serious about putting 1 million datacenter satellites into space, then they are not serious about Mars.

You cannot simultaneously build and launch 10’s of thousands of Starships to deliver 1 million tons of equipment and supplies bound to Mars while also committing to launching 10’s of thousands of Starships to orbit full of satellites.

They would need to quadruple their launch rate, and half of those launches would be Starships bound for Mars, the vast majority of which would never return.

How many Falcon9’s have ever been built? It is incredible to say you can build that many rockets and use up that much fuel on any reasonable time scale. You might as well say the Tesla Roadster version 3 will be a Single Stage to Orbit rocket car.

At least there will be AI and Agentic stuff in mars.

Is he also talking about moving X's servers (since xAI owns X) into space?

I think there is one more possible framing for this.

Recently xAI has been in the news for Groq's revenge-porn-like "undress them" feature, which seems pretty legally questionable.

Musk has also been in the news for his own Epstein-related activities.

If he can move Groq and X into space, well, there's not very many age-of-consent or revenge-porn laws in space as far as I know, so maybe he'll be able to do some sort of legal leverage where the space data-center can produce otherwise legally questionable AI responses with impunity.

Friendly reminder for anyone that forgot - xAI acquired Twitter, so now Space-X is the proud owner of a dying social media platform that they overpaid for.

Any claims that this is about putting compute in space is just a non-sense distraction. This was absolutely about bailing Elon out of his impulsive, drug-fueled Twitter purchase.

The only question now is: when they try to go public, will they be punished for wasting so much money or not? My guess is: not.

SpaceX has jumped the shark.

Makes about as much sense as Twitch buying Curse about.. a decade ago?

Purely financial shenanigans. Nothing to see here, please move along.