SpaceX's IPO registration statement describes a plan to deploy orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028, betting that space solves the power and cooling constraints strangling terrestrial AI infrastructure. The financials tell a more grounded story: the only profitable segment is Starlink broadband, which funds everything else.
On April 8, Elon Musk listed seven models in simultaneous training on Colossus 2 and captioned the post "Some catching up to do." The cluster burns 400 megawatts, runs on an estimated 550,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, and is training a 10-trillion-parameter model. The question is whether scale alone can close the gap.
Ten of xAI's twelve original co-founders have now departed, including Guodong Zhang, who led Grok Code and Grok Imagine. Elon Musk has publicly admitted the company "was not built right first time around" and is rebuilding from the ground up, weeks after SpaceX acquired xAI in the largest M&A deal in history.