SpaceXAI

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). On July 6, 2026 the rebrand completed: the xAI name was retired and the AI business now ships as SpaceXAI, with a new logo folding the SpaceX swoosh-X into “AI”. 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.