By Al Root
Elon Musk is dissolving his artificial-intelligence company, xAI. That sounds alarming, but it amounts to corporate restructuring ahead of his rocket company's record-setting initial public offering.
Now, SpaceX is the entity that will vie for AI supremacy with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet. The company is getting its ducks in a row ahead of an IPO that is expected to be the biggest ever, raising as much as $75 billion and value the company at up to $2 trillion.
Wednesday afternoon, Musk tweeted "xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX." He was responding to another post about xAI's newly announced deal with Anthropic.
AI underpins the expected massive valuation for Musk's spacecraft company.
About a year ago, SpaceX was valued at roughly $400 billion -- enough to make it the most valuable aerospace and defense company on the planet. At the time, its worth was based on SpaceX's dominant launch franchise, which handles more than half of the world's orbital launches, and the Starlink space-based broadband product, with more than 10 million subscribers.
Then came SpaceX's AI pivot, pushing its valuation exponentially higher. Musk wants to put data centers in space, avoiding power charges from utilities. He predicts space-based computing will be cost-competitive with land-based data centers in only a few years.
Just this week, SpaceX announced a partnership giving Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity across over 220,000 Nvidia chips at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.
Anthropic needs more computing capacity as it gains traction with its Claude AI tools. It's good that SpaceX has the capacity to sell. It's a little like Oracle's $300 billion deal with OpenAI. Still, excess capacity could mean that xAI's assistant and reasoning model, Grok, isn't growing like Claude.
Details of the Antrhropic deal and corporate structure should be in SpaceX's S-1 IPO registration statement that should be made public in a matter of days.
SpaceX filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March or early April, according to reports. Many companies file confidentially while they work out details with regulators.
After the registration statement is made public, an IPO roadshow can start where investors learn about business details and strategy. After that comes the IPO.
SpaceX's public market debut should be epic -- fitting for a company that pioneered reusable rockets and with ambitions to put a human colony on Mars.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 07, 2026 10:47 ET (14:47 GMT)
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