Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite manufacturer SpaceX has acquired his artificial intelligence startup xAI. SpaceX reports this on his website. With the merger, SpaceX wants to create “the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and beyond) Earth.” Musk does not report how much money xAI was acquired for. According to news site The Information the AI company was bought for 250 billion dollars (about 212 billion euros).
“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling up to create a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” said Musk.
The merger makes the combined company worth around $1.3 trillion, reports Bloomberg. The acquisition ranks as one of the most ambitious mergers in the technology sector to date, merging a space and defense contractor with a fast-growing AI developer whose costs are largely determined by chips, data centers and energy.
The deal brings together two of the largest privately held companies in the world. In addition, the acquisition could strengthen SpaceX’s data center ambitions. Musk competes with rivals such as Alphabet’s Google, Meta, Amazon-backed Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI sector.
An anonymous source told Reuters that investors in xAI will receive 0.1433 SpaceX shares for each xAI share as part of the acquisition. Some xAI executives may also choose to receive cash instead of SpaceX shares, at $75.46 per share, according to the source.
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