Elon Musk told employees at xAI (X.AI) on Tuesday that the AI startup needed a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space, the New York Times reported.
The space catapult would be known as a mass driver and would be part of an imagined facility on the moon that makes satellites to provide the computing power for the company’s AI, the report added.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
“You have to go to the moon,” said Tesla (TSLA) CEO Musk during an all-hands meeting, which was heard by the news outlet. Musk added that the move would help xAI harness more power than other companies to build its AI, according to the report.
“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 noted.
Earlier this month, SpaceX (SPACE) announced it was acquiring xAI. Musk had said then, “This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”
On Monday, Musk said on his social media platform X that SpaceX will focus on building a base on the moon before attempting Mars. “For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” Musk added.
In his hour long talk on Tuesday, Musk did not say how the lunar facility could be built, the report added.
Musk’s focus on the moon is a recent one. Two former SpaceX executives told the news outlet that the moon had never been a main focus of the company, the report noted.
Musk described the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. First, he noted that the company would build “a self-sustaining city on the moon,” then travel to Mars and finally explore star systems in search of aliens, the report added.
Musk also talked about X, noting that X has around 600M monthly active users. NYT said that it was unable to verify the claim. When Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022, it said it had 237.8M daily active users who were able to view ads, the report added.
“Most people only occasionally come to the X app when there’s some major world event,” said Musk. However, he said the addition of more services in the coming months — such as a banking feature called X Money and a stand-alone chat app — would make X more appealing, the report noted.
“We’ll obviously give people reasons, compelling reasons, to use the app every day and have, my expectation is, well over a billion daily active users,” Musk noted.
“If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader, and xAI is moving faster than any other company — no one’s even close,” said. “Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. And actually, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.”
In the last two days, xAI has lost two of its co-founders. Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu both have stepped down.
x.AI’s chatbot Grok and X have recently come under scrutiny following the alleged generation of deepfake images by the AI service.