Elon Musk Floats Plan for Moon-Based A.I. Satellite Factory with
Giant Space Catapult
In a meeting with employees at his company
xAI, Mr. Musk revealed a vision for a facility that includes
a giant catapult to launch his satellites into space.
·
Lunar Factory Vision: Elon Musk told xAI employees that the company should build a factory on
the Moon to manufacture A.I. satellites, paired with a giant “mass driver”
(space catapult) to launch them into orbit.
·
Goal: Unmatched Computing Power: Musk said producing
satellites on the Moon would allow xAI to harness far
greater computing capacity than Earth-based rivals to power large-scale
artificial intelligence.
·
xAI–SpaceX Synergy: The plan builds on
Musk’s recent announcement to merge xAI with SpaceX,
aiming to enable A.I. data centers in outer space.
·
No Concrete Timeline: While Musk described
the concept in detail, he did not explain how or when such a lunar facility
could realistically be built.
·
Strategic Shift Toward the Moon: Historically focused
on Mars, Musk now frames the Moon as a steppingstone—first a self-sustaining
lunar city, then Mars, and eventually interstellar exploration.
·
Internal Skepticism: Former SpaceX
executives said the Moon was never a central priority, suggesting this is a
relatively new strategic emphasis.
·
X (Formerly Twitter) Expansion Plans: Musk claimed X has
around 600 million monthly users and outlined plans to boost daily usage
through new services like X
Money and a separate chat app.
·
Ambitious User Targets: He expects X to exceed
one billion daily active users in the future, though such claims have not been
independently verified.
·
Track Record of Bold Forecasts: Musk has a history of
optimistic timelines, including a 2016 prediction of a Mars cargo mission by
2018 that has yet to occur.
·
xAI Organizational
Changes: Musk hinted at rapid growth, internal reorganization, and
the possible departure of some early-stage employees as the company scales.
Elon
Musk told employees at xAI, his artificial intelligence
company, on Tuesday evening that the company needed a factory on the moon to build
A.I. satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space.
Inspired
by the billionaire’s love of science fiction, the space catapult would be called
a mass driver, and would be part of an imagined lunar facility that manufactured
satellites to provide the computing power for the company’s A.I.
“You
have to go to the moon,” Mr. Musk said during an all-hands meeting, which was heard
by The New York Times. The move would help xAI harness
more power than other companies to build its A.I., he said.
“It’s
difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s
going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen,” he added.
Last
week, Mr. Musk said he was merging xAI with his rocket
business, SpaceX, to facilitate his plans to create A.I. data centers in outer space. Now that vision has expanded to include
the lunar facility, though he did not say in his hourlong talk, which also featured
remarks from other executives, how it could be built.
Those
two arms of Mr. Musk’s business empire are merging as SpaceX prepares an initial
public offering, which could come as early as June. A representative for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr.
Musk’s fixation with the moon is a recent one. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, he
has said making humanity multiplanetary, first by establishing a colony on Mars,
was the company’s raison d’être. But in recent months, he has posted frequently
on X, his social media platform, about the company’s new focus: the moon.
Two
former SpaceX executives told The Times, on the condition of anonymity because they
were not authorized to speak publicly about corporate plans, that the moon had never
been a main focus of the company.
In
his remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Musk described the moon as a steppingstone to Mars.
First, he said, the company would build “a self-sustaining city on the moon,” then
travel to Mars and finally explore star systems in search of aliens.
Mr.
Musk also talked about more earthly concerns with workers. Alongside executives
from X, which he merged with xAI last year, Mr. Musk described
the social network’s progress and where he hopes it will go.
X
has about 600 million monthly active users, Mr. Musk said, a metric that The Times
was not able to verify. When he acquired the company, then known as Twitter, in
2022, it said it had 237.8 million daily active users who were able to view ads.
“Most
people only occasionally come to the X app when there’s some major world event,”
Mr. Musk said. But he said the addition of more services in the coming months —
such as a banking feature called X Money and a stand-alone chat app — would make
X more appealing.
“We’ll
obviously give people reasons, compelling reasons, to use the app every day and
have, my expectation is, well over a billion daily active users,” he said.
Mr.
Musk has made bold and sometimes inaccurate predictions about when he will be able
to introduce new technologies. In 2016, for instance, he said SpaceX would send
its first cargo to Mars by 2018, a mission that has yet to materialize.
But
he told employees that he expected xAI to continue to
grow quickly, even as he hinted at the loss of early-stage employees and a possible
reorganization of the company.
“If
you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be
the leader, and xAI is moving faster than any other company
— no one’s even close,” Mr. Musk said. “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re
organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. And actually, when this
happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company
and less suited for the later stages.”