Elon Musk wants to build an AI satellite factory on the moon

Published Wed, Feb 11, 2026 · 11:56 AM

[SAN FRANCISCO] Elon Musk told employees at xAI, his artificial intelligence (AI) company, on Tuesday (Feb 10) evening that the company needed a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space.

Inspired by the billionaire’s love of science fiction, the space catapult would be called a mass driver, and would be part of an imagined lunar facility that manufactured satellites to provide the computing power for the company’s AI.

“You have to go to the moon,” Musk said during an all-hands meeting, which was heard by The New York Times. The move would help xAI harness more power than other companies to build its AI, he said.

“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,” he added.

Last week, Musk said he was merging xAI with his rocket business, SpaceX, to facilitate his plans to create AI data centres in outer space. Now that vision has expanded to include the lunar facility, though he did not say in his hourlong talk, which also featured remarks from other executives, how it could be built.

Those two arms of Musk’s business empire are merging as SpaceX prepares an initial public offering, which could come as early as June. A representative for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk’s fixation with the moon is a recent one. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, he has said making humanity multiplanetary, first by establishing a colony on Mars, was the company’s raison d’etre. But in recent months, he has posted frequently on X, his social media platform, about the company’s new focus: the moon.

Two former SpaceX executives told the Times, on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly about corporate plans, that the moon had never been a main focus of the company.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Musk described the moon as a steppingstone to Mars. First, he said, the company would build “a self-sustaining city on the moon”, then travel to Mars and finally explore star systems in search of aliens.

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Musk also talked about more earthly concerns with workers. Alongside executives from X, which he merged with xAI last year, Musk described the social network’s progress and where he hopes it will go.

X has about 600 million monthly active users, Musk said, a metric that the Times was not able to verify. When he acquired the company, then known as Twitter, in 2022, it said that it had 237.8 million daily active users who were able to view ads.

“Most people only occasionally come to the X app when there’s some major world event,” Musk said. But 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.

“We will obviously give people reasons, compelling reasons, to use the app every day and have, my expectation is, well over a billion daily active users,” he said.

Musk has made bold and sometimes inaccurate predictions about when he will be able to introduce new technologies. In 2016, for instance, he said SpaceX would send its first cargo to Mars by 2018, a mission that has yet to materialise.

But he told employees that he expected xAI to continue to grow quickly, even as he hinted at the loss of early-stage employees and a possible reorganisation of the company.

“If you are 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,” Musk said. “Because we have reached a certain scale, we are organising 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.” NYTIMES