SpaceX

SpaceX, Elon Musk's space-launch company (founded 2002), became a major AI lab through its 2026 acquisition of xAI. xAI — Musk's AI startup, founded in 2023 by Musk and 11 researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Research — was absorbed in an all-stock merger in February 2026 that valued the combined company at ~$1.25T (xAI itself marked at ~$250B); it is now SpaceX's wholly-owned AI division (Grok, X, and AI compute), informally dubbed “SpaceXAI” though it still ships under the xAI brand. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX went public on Nasdaq (ticker SPCX) in the largest IPO in history by capital raised (~$75B; priced at $135/share for an implied ~$1.77T valuation); the stock has since climbed to a market capitalization of ~$2.05T. Elon Musk is CEO; Michael Nicolls (former SpaceX Starlink engineering VP) was named xAI president in April 2026.

The Grok family progressed rapidly from Grok-1 (314B MoE, open-sourced with 51K stars) to Grok 4.3 (April 2026; 1M-token context; Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 38 — “high” variant, on AA's recalibrated v4.1). Grok-3 (February 2025) was trained on 200K GPUs at the Colossus supercomputer; Grok-4 (July 2025) added native tool-calling and extended reasoning. In May 2026 the team shipped Grok Build, an agentic coding CLI (with a dedicated coding model), competing with Claude Code and Codex.

The original Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee houses ~230K GPUs (150K H100 + 50K H200 + 30K GB200, ~250MW), with a second site, Colossus 2, scaling toward a 1M-GPU target (xAI claims gigawatt-scale power, though independent satellite analysis by Epoch AI suggests cooling capacity is closer to ~350MW). SpaceX increasingly monetizes Colossus capacity to third parties: reported multi-year compute agreements include Anthropic (~$1.25B/month), Google (~$920M/month), and, announced June 2026, Reflection AI — an open-model lab that will reportedly pay up to ~$6.3B through 2029 for Nvidia GB300 capacity in Colossus 2. The NAACP has sued SpaceX/xAI under the Clean Air Act over gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi that power its Colossus expansion; in June 2026 the DOJ moved to intervene and dismiss the suit on national-security grounds.

Days after the IPO, in June 2026 SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI coding company Cursor (Anysphere) for $60B in an all-stock deal — pending regulatory approval, with an expected Q3 2026 close — to be folded under the xAI division (Cursor was last independently valued at $29.3B in November 2025). The company has seen heavy attrition: all of xAI's original co-founders have now departed — Igor Babuschkin (DeepMind AlphaStar) left in August 2025 to start Babuschkin Ventures, and Jimmy Ba (Adam optimizer, Layer Normalization co-author) in February 2026 — and since the SpaceX deal 50+ staff have left for rivals such as Meta and Thinking Machines Lab.