SpaceX to File for IPO ⇢

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CNBC is breaking the prospectus down, but a few things jumped out at me right away.

First, this bit from Lora Kolodny:

The company breaks down its business into three units: Space, Connectivity and AI. Connectivity includes the Starlink satellite internet service, which is sold directly to consumers, as well as to government and military agencies.

According to the filing, Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue in the latest quarter, accounting for 69% of the total. The company now boasts about 10.3 million Starlink subscribers.

Connectivity is also the only profitable part of the company. The space business lost $619 million in the quarter on an operating basis, and AI unit lost $2.5 billion. Connectivity recorded a profit of $1.19 billion.

Ashley Capoot has more about how Memphis plays a part in this:

Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 as part of the compute deal the companies announced earlier this month, according to the filing.

The AI company will use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the companies announced previously. Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of capacity in space.

Depending on how the IPO goes, the combined enterprise could be worth trillions of dollars, even though it lost a casual $4.9 billion last year. Those are not even the wildest numbers in the paperwork, as spotted by Thomas Ricker and Emma Roth:

It’s also telling them that SpaceX has “identified the largest actionable total addressable market (TAM) in human history,” potentially worth $28.5 trillion, with $370 billion from space, $1.6 trillion in connectivity with Starlink Broadband and Starlink Mobile, and $26.5 trillion in AI, which includes AI infrastructure, subscriptions, advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

Asa Fitch at the WSJ:

The number isn’t too far off from the U.S.’s gross domestic product last year and would be about a quarter of 2025 global GDP.

Maybe after going public — as soon as next month — SpaceX could afford to restart that water treatment plant that xAI promised to build.

The BOOK II ⇢

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The folks behind the Pocket 8086 are back with a new machine:

The BOOK II is a portable Apple II (Plus) compatible computer, redesigned using standard TTL chips and equipped with ROMs from early Apple II compatibles or clones. Beyond its core Apple II functionality, it integrates several built-in enhancements: an 80-column video card, a 16KB Language Card, a Z80 Softcard, a printer controller, and a Disk II compatible controller.

As a portable computer, the BOOK II features a built-in lithium battery, an RGB LCD, and a low-profile mechanical keyboard. It supports original Apple Disk II floppy drives as well as floppy drive emulators.

Oh mama:

Book II

The feature list is pretty great:

  • CPU: 6502
  • SRAM: 48KB (+16KB)
  • Z80 Softcard
  • 80 Column Video Card
  • 16KB Language Card RAM
  • Disk II controller
  • Printer Interface
  • RGB Display
  • Mechanical keyboard
  • Lithium battery (4×18650)
  • Expansion Bus Support (Slot 5)

At $550, this is an expensive little machine, but one that I very much want.

‘Grok is the RC Cola’ of the AI World

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Joe Wilkins, writing at Futurism:

In the AI world, there are what the tech scholar Kate Crawford has called the “Great Houses of AI.” These are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — giant tech monopolies which happen to also be four of the six top US corporations by market value.

Then there are the lesser houses, the lower fiefdoms squabbling over the crumbs that fall from the big kids’ table. This is where we find Elon Musk’s xAI. Though the world’s richest man has pumped billions of dollars into his pet AI project, it seems all the money in the world can’t buy customers — or even respect, for that matter.

According to the Wall Street Journal, new data shows the growth of xAI’s two-year old chatbot, Grok, has stagnated. Though Musk succeeded in giving Grok a temporary boost after integrating the thing into his social media site X, formerly Twitter, new monthly downloads have fallen from over 20 million in January to just 8.3 million in April.

Here’s a bit from that WSJ piece, written by Georgia Wells:

“In a survey of more than 260,000 U.S. consumers and workers who use AI, the percent of respondents who said they paid for Grok remained mostly flat at 0.174% in the second quarter of 2026 versus 0.173% a year ago, according to research firm Recon Analytics. More than 6% of respondents said they paid for ChatGPT.”

“OpenAl is Coke, Anthropic is Pepsi and Grok is RC Cola,” said Ben Pouladian, an engineer and tech investor based in Los Angeles. “I never really saw people drinking it.”

Pouladian, as the WSJ reports, “drives a Tesla and is active on X.”

The bubble may yet burst, but even if it doesn’t fully pop, I think these smaller companies are clearly in trouble. Between content and environmental issues, I’m all for xAI going first. Other companies could take over its remaining property in Memphis, hopefully being better stewards of the natural resources that make the Mid-South such a desirable location for data centers.

This is exactly why xAI was merged into SpaceX. The former may be bleeding money and losing users, but SpaceX generates enough cash that a lot of the bad can get washed away.

Surprise! xAI is Running a Bunch of Unpermitted Turbines in North Mississippi

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Tim De Chant, TechCrunch:

Elon Musk’s xAI is running nearly 50 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center, power plants that the state is currently not regulating thanks to a loophole.

The power plants are considered “mobile” by the state of Mississippi because they are sitting on flatbed trailers, thus allowing them to dodge to air pollution regulations for one year. The NAACP, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents in the area, says the unchecked emissions from the turbines is worsening air quality in an already polluted region. This week, it asked the court for an injunction against xAI.

These turbines power xAI’s second data center in the Memphis area. The first was recently leased to Anthropic.

Currently, xAI has a permit for 15 turbines at the site, but as Alex Rozier writes, the company is running a lot more than that:

XAI now has 46 “temporary-mobile” turbines at its Mississippi facility, according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, up from 18 turbines when it first arrived last year.

Building Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

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Logan Kugler, writing in early April:

The computer system aboard the current Artemis II lunar space mission is from a different world that the one from the Apollo era. Apollo astronauts navigated to the lunar surface using a computer with a 1-MHz processor and roughly 4 kilobytes of erasable memory, supported by a larger store of fixed “rope” memory. While it was a marvel of 1960s engineering, the Apollo Guidance Computer’s functional scope was focused and not in the control loop for every system. Critical environmental and power controls were managed through manual or electromechanical means, such as switches and relays.

This month’s Artemis II mission carrying a crew of four around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years is supported by one of the most fault-tolerant computer system built for spaceflight. Unlike Apollo, the Orion capsule’s computing architecture manages nearly all of the vessel’s safety-critical functions, from life support to communication routing.

When a mission is 250,000 miles from Earth, failure is unrecoverable. There are no runways for emergency landings and no technicians to swap out a fried motherboard. Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.

I love stories about computers in space.

Google Fitbit Air ⇢

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I love the health-tracking features of my Apple Watch (duh) but there are times that I’d rather wear a watch without Slack or iMessage on it. For years, I’ve clamored for Apple to make a screenless tracker like the Whoop band. It seems like Google beat Apple to the punch with its new Fitbit Air:

Fitbit Air

Samantha Kelly has more at Bloomberg:

The new device bears a striking resemblance to Whoop’s health tracker, featuring a soft fabric band with a battery and sensor pack underneath. One big difference is the business model: an upfront cost to buy the hardware and an optional $10 per month Google Health subscription. Whoop doesn’t charge for its hardware but instead has an annual subscription fee that begins at $200.

The Fitbit Air may appeal to users seeking a simpler alternative to the Apple Watch — one with fewer distractions and notifications — or a cheaper option than rival health trackers. The popular Oura Ring health tracker, sold by Oura Health Oy, starts at $349, while the cheapest smartwatch from Apple Inc., the SE 3, is $249. Many of Google’s existing Fitbits cost over $100, while its Pixel Watch 4 is $349.

Oura rings and Whoop bands1 can both sync data with Apple’s HealthKit. Google is launching a new Health app2 that the company says can accept data from HealthKit:

You can connect third-party data sources to the Google Health app to keep your health and fitness data in one place. This allows you to track your progress across multiple platforms like Android Health Connect, Apple Health, and other third-party apps. Once your data is connected, you can see all your data in one place, and ask Google Health Coach questions about your fitness and health data.

Hopefully that sync is actually bidirectional.

The Fitbit Air, at its low price of $99, is certainly intriguing. Even if it syncs with HealthKit, I think a lot of iPhone users would look to Apple for a product like this. I hope it becomes popular to a point that Apple takes notice and builds the fitness band of my dreams.

  1. I’ve tried an Oura ring a couple of times over the years, but I just don’t like having things on my hands. Heck, my wedding band is a tattoo. ↩
  2. There is a basic free version, and an AI-infused Premium version. ↩

Anthropic Taking Over All Capacity of xAl’s First Memphis Data Center

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Some afternoon news from an unsigned xAI press release:

SpaceXAI has signed an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers.

Built from the ground up in record time, Colossus delivers unprecedented scale for AI training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-performance computing workloads. Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators. The cluster delivers extreme parallel performance for large language models, multimodal systems, scientific simulations, and generative AI at frontier scale.

Anthropic plans to use this additional compute to directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

Anthropic confirmed the news via an unsigned press release:

We’ve agreed to a partnership with SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity. This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.

…and included a detail that SpaceXAI1 left out:

We’ve signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center. This gives us access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month. This additional capacity will directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

Let me repeat part of that for emphasis:

We’ve signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center.

As a native Memphian who has watched xAI pollute our air, make tools for creating horrific content, and go back on its word to local leaders, this is both infuriating and hilarious.

Colossus 2 is up and running and Musk says xAI no longer needs the first site.

Russell Brandom has more at Techcrunch:

In the short term, there’s an obvious logic at work. xAI’s existing products are mostly focused on Grok, which has seen plummeting usage since the image generation debacles earlier this year. If xAI’s data center buildout is that much more than what Grok needs to operate, partnering with Anthropic adds a lot of green to the balance sheet. This is especially useful as the company, now combined with SpaceX, speeds towards an IPO. More broadly, having Anthropic lined up as a customer makes it easier to believe that SpaceX’s orbital data center play might actually work. 

But beyond the short-term benefit, the Anthropic partnership sends an unusual message about where Elon Musk’s priorities really lie. It suggests the company’s real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models.

I wonder if this is the reason the planned water treatment plant for the first site is now on hold. If xAI isn’t operating Colossus 1, the company may want out of it, despite previous comments.

Anthropic seems to be backed into a corner when it comes to capacity. I can’t imagine everyone there was super pumped to be associated with xAI, and the partnership will certainly cause some to sour on the company and its products.

I don’t know if Anthropic will have any real presence in Memphis. Some may see this as a chance for a bit of a reboot when it comes to the public relation issues xAI has faced here, but it I don’t have high hopes for that. Anthropic is merely leasing capacity, not taking over the data center outright.

Even if Colossus 1 were to change hands, the only meaningful thing Anthropic could do (from an environmental standpoint) would be to get the water treatment plant back on track. The site isn’t going to be able to move to cleaner energy anytime soon, no matter what chatbot is running on its servers.

Claude customers will see a benefit, and SpaceX’s books will look a little better, but that’s all the change I see coming with this news.

Original post updated to reflect the news that xAI had already moved to its Colossus 2 site.

  1. In case you missed it, SpaceX now owns xAI, which in turn owns the X social network. SpaceX seems to have been the only one of the three making any money. As a fan of cool rockets and a non-fan of X and xAI, this has stirred complicated feelings for me. ↩