“If the idea of a mass driver on the moon appeals to you, join xAI,” CEO Elon Musk declared yesterday, following a restructuring that saw a flurry of former executives leave the AI Institute.
This is an interesting hiring strategy after the company merges with Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and the combined company goes through an expected IPO. You might think that xAI employees would be interested in disrupting traditional software companies using deep learning models, or simply using bad wordplay like “macrohard” to achieve AGI. But instead, Elon goes to the moon.
After outlining plans to build an AI data center in orbit, a key synergy between the two companies, Musk took the idea further. “What if I want to get just over 1 terawatt a year?” Musk asked. “For that, we have to go to the moon…I would like to see a mass driver on the moon launching AI satellites into deep space.”
Beyond the data centers orbiting Earth, Musk says, lies an even bigger computer in deep space. And Musk has said that the best way to accomplish that is by building a city on the moon to build space computers and then launching them into the solar system in maglev trains.
If that feels like a bit of a stretch, veteran mask watchers know that there are clues as to where the discussion will appear in the video of the all-hands meeting that xAI released to the public. Slides explaining the moon base are posted at the end of the presentation deck, and during SpaceX pep talks, Musk typically shares a rendering of a SpaceX rocket landing on Mars and gushes about the future of multiplanetary humanity.
Notably, the construction of the moon base comes shortly after SpaceX publicly backed away from its long-standing goal of colonizing Mars. Now that xAI is integrated into enterprises, Musk needs a new sci-fi metaphor for the future. In this case, the Kardashev scale is a theoretical measure of galactic civilization devised by the eponymous Soviet astronomer in the 1960s. The idea is to scale up energy use. Early civilizations figured out how to harness all the power sources on the planet and then (hypothetically) built infrastructure to go into space and capture the sun’s energy.
Musk said a moon base could potentially use “perhaps even a percentage of the sun’s energy” to train and operate AI models. “It’s hard to imagine what an intelligence of that size would think,” he told his staff. “But it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”
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In the nine years since Mr. Musk announced plans to explore and colonize Mars, that vision has become an effective recruiting tool for SpaceX. The founding story of Musk’s Mars interests provided a long-term vision to unify the company’s various development efforts and demonstrated the company’s ambitions among other space contractors that have settled into addressing government priorities incrementally. The “Occupy Mars” T-shirt provided a visible symbol of SpaceX’s ambitions.
That’s where the virtual Moonbase fits in. This is part of Musk’s long history of wrapping his companies in powerful narratives. Mars is home to a million people, and now AI is handling the most interesting future. The creepiness of Mars missions was less evident in Musk’s May 2025 Starship update, which ended with a vision of the now-canceled Tesla Optimus robot crossing Mars.
There was just one problem with SpaceX and Mars. No one wanted to pay them to go there. A plan announced in 2016 to repurpose the company’s Dragon spacecraft as a Mars lander was abandoned the following year because the technical challenges were too expensive. And since Musk unveiled the spacecraft that would become Starship in 2016, its capabilities, originally intended to colonize Mars, have been scaled back to focus on two more high-paying jobs. It is a $4 billion contract with NASA to launch satellites for the Starlink communications network and land astronauts on the moon.
Unlike multiplanetary civilizations, there may be some logic in having SpaceX buy money-spending AI and social media and build data centers in Earth orbit, especially if predictions of rising demands and costs on the ground come true. Experts suggest it could be possible by the 2030s.
If we were to build a satellite on the moon, many of Musk’s other dreams would have to come true first. Scientists and startups are experimenting with 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 go to space, a core requirement of these technologies, and we can source all the raw materials needed for such an endeavor on the moon, as well as everything needed for “self-reliant cities.”
In a way, that’s important. This is, uh, a stretch goal. If meme-happy retail investors buy into this argument, they could turn SpaceX stock into the next Tesla. The changes may be uncomfortable for the AI, aerospace and other engineers needed to help Mr. Musk achieve his goals. But vision is one way to explain what xAi is, other than LLM, which is probably best known as pervert. As one of the company’s outgoing executives said on his way home, “Every AI lab makes the exact same thing, and it’s boring.”
Mass-producing a solar-system-sized supercomputer on the moon is a lot of things (I’m about to get an email telling me not to use the word “insane”), but it’s not exactly the same, and it’s not boring.
