Introduction
On 30th January 2026, SpaceX filed plans for an orbital data centre constellation for a whopping one million satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The very next working day, SpaceX announced its acquisition of xAI, the company behind Grok. Elon is assembling his Avengers, but for what?
In Elon’s announcement on the SpaceX website, he believes that the continuously available solar power in LEO is the cost-effective way to get to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). An all-knowing entity up in the sky? Talk about creating a god; Brandon Sanderson could take a leaf out of Elon’s book.
There is much to say about the economics of the xAI acquisition with regards to the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO — we won’t dwell on this aspect, and instead refer you to this podcast.
Instead, in this post we will flesh out the mission concept for this ambitious undertaking from an engineering perspective. Through this exercise, we aim to cut through the hype and technically assess the feasibility of this endeavour.
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