As Grok flounders, SpaceX bets future on beating Big Tech at AI

SpaceX’s bet on its future AI business goes beyond Grok. The company’s financial filing disclosed work with Musk’s company Tesla on the development of “Macrohard,” which it describes as “an agentic AI platform designed to be capable of fully emulating digital workflows and augmenting human operation of computers using sophisticated autonomous agents.”

The filing also mentioned the Terafab initiative—an even more ambitious venture involving SpaceX, Tesla, and Intel—that aims to build a chip manufacturing facility capable of “producing 1 terawatt per year of compute hardware.” But SpaceX cautioned that both the agentic AI and chip fab projects are “in the very early stages” of development.

For now, SpaceX claims to already “own and operate what we believe to be the largest AI training data center clusters on Earth” with its Colossus and Colossus II data center campuses located in Memphis, Tennessee. However, SpaceX recently struck a deal with rival AI company Anthropic that gives the latter complete use of the entire compute capacity for the Colossus data center.

The reason for this decision may be how the rapid buildout of Colossus incorporated a mix of different Nvidia GPU chips that was very inefficient for AI training workloads, according to reporting by Tom’s Hardware. So it potentially made more sense for SpaceX to rent out one of its “AI training data center clusters” to Anthropic so that the latter could run more AI inference tasks for Claude users.

But SpaceX’s biggest bet is on unshackling AI compute from terrestrial limitations and using its launch capabilities to eventually deploy up to 1 million satellites designed to act as orbital data centers—something that the company claims it is uniquely positioned to do. Ars has previously examined the logic behind orbital data centers along with the economic challenges of taking this course of action.

Building that orbital data center future envisioned by SpaceX would potentially require more than a trillion dollars. The latest financial disclosures show the company is currently unprofitable—the Starlink Internet satellite service being the only profitable unit— with a growing debt load that has reached $29 billion. SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026, while spending more than $10 billion on primarily AI infrastructure along with rocket and satellite hardware, according to the investment research firm Morningstar.

Given that spending spree and Grok’s lagging position in the AI race, the expected SpaceX IPO would provide a critical cash infusion to the company. It remains to be seen whether enough investors embrace SpaceX’s vision for the future to see it through.