Image: SpaceX
Elon Musk’s ambitions for artificial intelligence just left Earth’s orbit. During a recent all-hands meeting at xAI, Musk told employees the company ultimately needs to build an AI satellite factory on the Moon — complete with a giant “mass driver” to launch satellites into deep space. According to The New York Times, Musk said plainly, “You have to go to the moon,” arguing that a lunar facility would allow xAI to harness more computing power than competitors.
The vision is pure Musk. “I really want to see a mass driver on the Moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space. I can’t imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the Moon, a self-sustaining city on the Moon, and then going to Mars, throughout our solar system, and ultimately being out there amongst the stars and visiting all these star systems. Maybe we’ll meet aliens.”
The proposed lunar factory would manufacture AI satellites designed to provide the immense computing power needed to train next-generation models. “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,” Musk said.
The remarks come just days after SpaceX and xAI officially merged, a move widely seen as a strategic play to combine launch capability with AI infrastructure. SpaceX is already seeking regulatory approval to deploy more than a million AI satellites, and recently announced it is pivoting toward building a self-sustaining city on the Moon before heading to Mars. Now, it appears xAI will play a central role in powering that vision.
Back on Earth, xAI is rapidly scaling. The company also showed off its “Macrohard” supercomputer cluster in Memphis, which will exceed 1 GW of power and eventually feature the largest Tesla Megapack installation in the world. Musk also revealed that xAI has restructured internally, saying, “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. Naturally, when this happens, there’s people who are better suited for the earlier stages of the company, and less suited for the later stages.”
He added separately that xAI was reorganized “to improve speed of execution,” noting the company is hiring aggressively — especially those inspired by “mass drivers on the Moon.”
Musk has made bold space promises before, some of which have yet to materialize. But with SpaceX preparing for a potential IPO and xAI scaling compute at breakneck speed, the Moon may now be more than just science fiction.
You can watch the full 45-minute all-hands xAI meeting, which the company has posted publicly on X, to hear directly from Musk about the lunar factory plan and xAI’s mandate moving forward.
