As Grok flounders, SpaceX bets future on beating Big Tech at AI

SpaceX sees AI as the cornerstone of its future, aiming for a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity. This ambition is outlined in financial disclosures preceding an anticipated initial public offering, where its traditional space and satellite businesses are presented as supporting roles to its AI endeavors. The company formally acquired xAI earlier this year, placing Grok AI models and the associated chatbot under the SpaceXAI division.

Despite these lofty aspirations, Grok has struggled to gain traction against established AI models. Surveys indicate significantly lower user adoption compared to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini. This underperformance is evident even with Grok's deep integration into Elon Musk's social media platform, X.

Furthermore, Grok has encountered significant challenges, including a "nudifying" scandal in early 2026 that allowed users to generate explicit images, leading to lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny. Its "Spicy" and "Unhinged" modes also raise concerns about reputational harm and the generation of harmful content, opening SpaceX to regulatory action and user backlash.

SpaceX's future AI strategy extends beyond Grok, encompassing projects like "Macrohard," an agentic AI platform, and "Terafab," an ambitious chip manufacturing initiative involving Tesla and Intel. However, both projects are in very early stages of development.

To power its AI ambitions, SpaceX claims to operate the world's largest AI training data centers, Colossus and Colossus II. Curiously, SpaceX recently granted rival Anthropic full use of its entire Colossus data center computing capacity, potentially due to inefficiencies in handling AI training workloads with a mix of Nvidia GPU chips.