(Photo by Hakan Nural/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Elon Musk’s xAI just got a new name, and it’s a bit of a mouthful: SpaceXAI.
Musk mentioned the name change on Wednesday, following his company's agreement to lease xAI’s Colossus 1 supercomputer and its over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs to Anthropic.
In a tweet, Musk also revealed that “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX.”
SpaceX is already moving to make the name change official. On Wednesday, it filed to use SpaceXAI in two trademark submissions with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
One filing indicates the company wants to use the SpaceXAI trademark to cover “satellite-based data center services and orbital computing infrastructure,” as well as “software as a service (SaaS) featuring artificial intelligence for data processing.” This likely reflects SpaceX's acquisition of xAI in February as part of Musk’s ambitious push to build orbiting data centers.
The second trademark filing for SpaceXAI covers a large range of services, such as “Global positioning system using satellite constellations; internet server, namely, computer network server; telecommunication hardware,” along with “internet service provider (isp) services,” “cloud storage services,” and social networking. Last year, xAI also took ownership of the social media platform X, thus SpaceX technically controls what used to be Twitter.
The name change and Anthropic deal are raising questions about whether SpaceX will become a “neocloud” provider of data centers specifically for AI compute to paying clients, rather than strictly developing AI models. The company is already working on data center satellites longer than the International Space Station, with plans to potentially operate up to 1 million of them in space. Meanwhile, xAI itself has lost all its original co-founders, outside of Musk, amid a rebuild.
SpaceX is also indicating it could develop a monopoly over orbiting data centers, if it can overcome the numerous technical and environment hurdles. “SpaceX is the only organization with the launch cadence, mass-to-orbit economics, and constellation operations experience to make orbital compute a near-term engineering program rather than a research concept. If engineering challenges can be overcome, space-based compute offers near-limitless sustainable power with less impact on Earth,” SpaceXAI wrote on Wednesday.
Anthropic says it’s also interested in working with SpaceX on developing “multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.” In the meantime, xAI has started to use the new name in tweets and in a post about the Anthropic partnership. Musk adds that users can expect a new logo for SpaceXAI.