SpaceX is an aerospace and AI compute company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI — Musk's AI company and operator of the Grok model series — in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $1.25 trillion combined. The rationale given at the time of the deal: terrestrial data centers face hard limits on power and cooling at AI scale. "Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions," the company stated.

The compute strategy operates across three layers. Terafab is a joint venture between SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI announced in March 2026 to build a semiconductor facility on the Giga Texas campus in Austin, with Intel as fabrication partner. Investment estimates range from $25B to $119B. The facility is designed to consolidate chip design, lithography, fabrication, memory, packaging, and testing under one roof, targeting 1 terawatt of AI compute output per year. SpaceX has filed an FCC application for a constellation of up to one million satellites to function as orbital AI compute nodes, powered by solar energy and passively cooled by the vacuum of space, with connectivity via Starlink's laser inter-satellite links. Musk has stated that 80% of Terafab's output is intended for this orbital deployment. With xAI now integrated, SpaceX controls the Grok model stack alongside the infrastructure required to run it — spanning chip fabrication, launch, and satellite operations.

SpaceX's launch and Starlink businesses underpin this strategy financially and logistically. Starlink surpassed 9 million subscribers in 2025 and generated approximately $10B of SpaceX's $15.5B in total 2025 revenue. SpaceX completed 170 launches in 2025, its sixth consecutive annual record, providing the flight cadence and payload capacity that a large-scale orbital compute constellation would require. The company reached an approximately $800B valuation in a December 2025 insider share sale and confidentially filed for a 2026 IPO targeting a valuation above $1 trillion.