Musk needed a new vision for SpaceX and xAI. He landed at Moonbase Alpha. | TechCrunch

“Join xAI if the idea of ​​mass riders on the moon appeals to you,” says CEO Elon Musk proclaimed yesterday after a restructuring that saw a stream of former executives leave the AI ​​lab.

This is an interesting recruitment strategy following the company’s merger with Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX, and the combined company’s expected initial public offering. You might think that xAI workers should be fascinated by achieving AGI, using deep learning models to disrupt traditional software companies, or just bad puns like “Macrohard.” But instead, Elon goes to the moon.

After Musk outlined plans to build AI data centers in orbit, the key synergy between the two companies, he moved forward with the idea. “What if you want to go beyond just one terawatt per year?” Musk asked. “To do that, you have to go to the moon… I really want to see a mass engine on the moon that shoots AI satellites into deep space.”

According to Musk, the step beyond data centers orbiting the Earth is even larger computers in deep space. And besides, Musk says the best way to do that is to build a city on the moon to manufacture space computers and throw them into the solar system using a giant magnetic train.

If that all feels a bit much, veteran Musk viewers know there’s a clue as to where the discussion occurs in a video of a meeting of all hands xAI shared with the public. The slide describing the moon base comes near the end of the presentation deck, where during SpaceX pep talks, Musk typically shares views of SpaceX rockets landing on Mars and waxes rhapsodic about the future of multi-planetary humanity.

Strikingly, the moon base comes just after SpaceX publicly retreated from its long-held goal of colonizing Mars. Now that xAI is part of the business world, Musk needs a new science fiction metaphor for the future: in this case, the Kardashev scalea theoretical benchmark for galactic civilizations, devised by the Soviet astronomer of the same name in the 1960s. The idea is to climb the scale of energy consumption – early civilizations figure out how to utilize all the energy resources 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 that magnitude would be thinking about,” he told his staff, “but it will be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”

In the nine years since Musk unveiled his plan for the exploration and colonization of Mars, the vision has been an effective recruiting tool for SpaceX: The story of Musk’s interest in the Red Planet offered a long-term vision that unified the company’s various development efforts, and signaled the company’s ambition to other space companies that were content with incremental work on government priorities. “Occupy Mars” t-shirts were 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 story. There are a million people living on Mars, but now they are focusing on a future where AI is most interesting. The mission of Mars became less clear to Musk May 2025 Starship Updateas the presentation ended with a now-cancelled vision of Tesla Optimus robots stomping across 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 the technical challenges became too expensive. And since Musk revealed The vehicle that would become Starship in 2016 has scaled back its capabilities, originally intended for the colonization of Mars, to focus on two more rewarding tasks: launching satellites for the Starlink communications network and $4 billion worth of contracts to land astronauts on the moon for NASA.

Unlike a multi-planetary civilization, there may be some logic in having SpaceX buy a money-burning AI and social media to build data centers in orbit, especially if predictions of rising demand and costs come true. Experts suggest this could be possible by 2030.

Hypothetically, building satellites on the moon would require many more of Musk’s other dreams to become reality first. Scientists and startups are experimenting with it building chips and other precision components in space. But the mass production of many tons of advanced computers on the moon means that we live in a universe where it is dramatically cheaper to go into space, which is the central requirement for those technologies, to get all the raw materials for such an effort to the moon, plus everything needed for a ‘self-sustaining city’.

In a sense, that’s the point: this is the ultimate goal. If meme-happy retail investors buy into this argument, they could turn SpaceX stock into the next Tesla. The engineers, AI or aerospace, that Musk needs to achieve his goals may find the shift shocking. But the vision is a way to explain what xAI is about, other than an LLM that is perhaps best known for being a pervert. As one of the company’s outgoing managers said on the way out: “all AI labs build exactly the same, and it’s boring.”

Mass producing a solar system-scale supercomputer on the moon involves a lot of things (I’m going to get emails for not using the word “insane”), but it’s not exactly the same, and it’s not boring.