“Join xAI if you like the idea of mass drivers on the Moon,” said CEO Elon Musk was proclaimed yesterday following a restructuring that saw a number of former executives leave the AI lab.
This is an interesting recruiting strategy following the company’s merger with Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and the combined company’s expected IPO. You might think xAI employees should be fascinated with achieving AGI, using deep learning models to disrupt traditional software companies, or just bad wordplay like “Macrohard.” Instead, Elon goes to the moon.
After outlining plans to build AI data centers in orbit, the primary synergy between the two companies, Musk took the idea further. “What if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt a year?” Musk asked. “To do that, you have to go to the moon… I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that launches artificial intelligence satellites into deep space.”
According to Musk, the step beyond Earth-orbiting data centers is even bigger computers in deep space. And furthermore, Musk says the best way to achieve this is to build a city on the moon to build space computers and launch them into the solar system using a large maglev train.
If all of that is a bit much, veteran Musk watchers know that there’s an idea of where the conversation goes in a video of a meeting of all hands xAI shared with the public. The slide describing the moon base comes at the end of the presentation deck, where, during SpaceX talks, Musk routinely shares renderings of SpaceX rockets landing on Mars and waxes rhapsodic about the future of multiplanetary humanity.
It’s worth noting that the moon base comes just as SpaceX has publicly backed away from its long-held goal of colonizing Mars. Now, with xAI in the corporate realm, Musk needs a new sci-fi metaphor for the future: In this case, the Kardashev scalea theoretical measure of galactic civilizations coined by the Soviet astronomer of the same name in the 1960s. The idea is to climb the scale of energy use – early civilizations figure out how to harness all the energy sources on their planets, and then (hypothetically) go into space and build infrastructure to capture the sun’s energy.
With the moon base, Musk says the company could harness “maybe even a few percent of the sun’s energy” to train and operate AI models. “It’s hard to imagine what an intelligence of this scale would think of,” he told his staff, “but it will be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
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In the nine years since Musk unveiled his plan to explore and colonize Mars, the vision has been an effective recruiting tool for SpaceX: Musk’s founding story of interest in the Red Planet offered a long-term vision that united the company’s various development efforts and signaled the company’s ambition among other space contractors. “Occupy Mars” T-shirts offered a visible symbol of SpaceX’s ambitions.
That’s where the hypothetical moon base fits in — part of a long history of Musk wrapping his companies in a powerful narrative. They are a million people living on Mars, but now serving a future where artificial intelligence is the most interesting thing. The creep of the Mars mission became less apparent to Musk May 2025 Starship Updatewhen the presentation ended with a now-cancelled vision of the Tesla Optimus robots traversing the Red Planet.
There was just one problem with SpaceX and Mars: No one wanted to pay them to go there. Plans announced in 2016 to repurpose the company’s Dragon spacecraft as a Mars lander were abandoned the following year after technical challenges became too costly. And since Musk was revealed the vehicle that would become Starship in 2016, its capabilities, originally intended for the colonization of Mars, have been reduced to focus on two more rewarding tasks: launching satellites for the Starlink communications network and contracts worth $4 billion to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA.
Unlike a multiplanetary civilization, there might be some logic to SpaceX buying an artificial intelligence and social media money-burner to build data centers in Earth orbit, particularly if predictions of rising demand and costs on the ground come to pass. Experts suggest it may be possible in the 2030s.
Hypothetically, building satellites on the moon would require many of Musk’s other dreams to come true first. Scientists and startups are experimenting building chips and other precision components in space. But mass-producing tons of advanced computers on the moon means we live in a universe where it’s dramatically cheaper to get to space, which is the central requirement for these technologies, to bring all the raw materials for such an endeavor to the moon, plus what’s required for a “self-sustaining city.”
In a sense, that’s the point: That’s the goal of expansion. If meme-happy private investors buy the argument, they could turn SpaceX stock into the next Tesla. The engineers, artificial intelligence or aerospace that Musk needs to achieve his goals may find the shift jarring. But the vision is one way to explain what xAI is, other than an LLM perhaps better known as perverted. As one of the company’s outgoing executives he said as he walks out the door, “all AI labs are building the exact same thing and it’s boring.”
Mass-producing a solar-system-scale supercomputer on the moon is many things (I’ll get emailed for not using the word “crazy”), but it’s not quite the same thing, and it’s not boring.
