What kind of financial engineering is going on here? Is xAI about to go bankrupt or something?
Probably. They are building the largest data centers in the world with very little revenue.
xAI joins SpaceX
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Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#382Just checking (genuine question) there wouldn't be a sneaky way to weaponize a million satellites in orbit around the Earth, would there? I can't imagine it wouldn't have ever been looked into.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#383Related: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission [1]. Blue Origin could snatch SpaceX's Starship lander contract. This looks increasingly a good idea.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#384I am concerned, and haven’t seen anyone else point this out yet, that Musk will move Grok’s CSAM generation capabilities to space to be beyond the reach of terrestrial policing. Does this create some sort of legal loophole here so Musk can do this with impunity?
No. For one, things in space are under the jurisdiction of the country they were launched from. For another, it's people that do crimes, not satellites or LLMs, and the people involved in making CSAM are all on Earth.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#385Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#386Related: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission [1]. Blue Origin could snatch SpaceX's Starship lander contract. This looks increasingly a good idea. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
> This looks increasingly a good idea.
Why?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#387Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…
An 8 GPU B200 cluster goes for about $500k right now. You'd need to put thousands of those into space to mimic a ground-based data center. And the launch costs are best case around 10x the cost of the cluster itself. Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.
A Falcon Heavy takes about 63 tons to LEO, at a cost of about $1,500 per kg.
A server with 4x H200s and some RAM and CPU costs about $200k, and weighs about 60kg, with all the cooling gear and thick metal. As is, it would cost $90k to get to LEO, half of the cost of the hardware itself.
I suppose that an orbit-ready server is going to cost more, and weigh less.
The water that serves as the coolant will weigh a lot though, but it can double as a radiation shield, and partly as reaction mass for orbital correction and deorbiting.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#389fool me once (Solar city) shame on you, fool me twice...