AI for Small Business
Six Actionable Ways Small Businesses Can Start Using AI and Automation Today
Elon Musk has merged his rocket company with his AI company in a $1.25 trillion deal. With the world's largest AI supercomputer, 9 million Starlink subscribers, and plans for data centres in orbit, this is not just a merger. It is the creation of something entirely new.
The Biggest Deal the World Has Ever Seen
On 2 February 2026, Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX had officially acquired xAI. The combined company is valued at $1.25 trillion, making it the largest merger in history. SpaceX is valued at roughly $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
The deal is structured as a share exchange. One share of xAI converts into 0.1433 shares of SpaceX stock. It brings together two of Musk's most ambitious ventures under one roof, with a stated goal that sounds like science fiction: building data centres in space.
But this is not just about space. It is about creating a vertically integrated technology empire that spans AI, robotics, satellite internet, rocket launches, social media, and soon, orbital computing. No single company has ever controlled so many pieces of the technology puzzle at once.
Why This Merger Happened Now
The timing is no accident. xAI was burning through roughly $1 billion per month building out its AI infrastructure. That is a staggering burn rate, even by Silicon Valley standards. Meanwhile, SpaceX is preparing for what could be the most anticipated IPO in history, reportedly targeting mid-June 2026.
By folding xAI into SpaceX, Musk secures long-term funding for his AI ambitions through SpaceX's revenue and the forthcoming IPO. It also positions the combined entity as the ultimate AI-plus-infrastructure play for investors.
Three days before the merger announcement, SpaceX filed plans with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites designed to operate as orbital data centres. Musk estimates that within two to three years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space, using solar power for onboard computing systems.
xAI: From Challenger to Contender
To understand why this merger matters so much, you need to understand what xAI has become in a remarkably short time.
Musk founded xAI in March 2023, announcing it publicly that July. His motivation was personal. He had co-founded OpenAI years earlier but walked away, frustrated by what he saw as the organisation drifting from its original open-source mission towards closed, commercially driven development. xAI would be different, he said. It would be "maximally truth-seeking" and attempt to "understand the true nature of the universe."
In just under three years, xAI has gone from a startup with a provocative mission statement to one of the three most valuable AI companies on the planet, sitting alongside OpenAI and Anthropic.
Its flagship product is Grok, the AI model that powers everything from the chatbot on X to enterprise applications. Grok's evolution has been relentless. Grok 1 launched in late 2023 as a curiosity. Grok 2 followed in 2024 with meaningful improvements. Then came the real step change.
Grok 3, released in February 2025, was trained with 10 times the compute of its predecessor across 200,000 GPUs. xAI claimed it outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o on benchmarks for mathematical reasoning and PhD-level science problems. In July 2025, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy arrived, with xAI claiming these models outperformed all rival offerings across multiple benchmarks. The latest flagship, Grok 4.1, runs on 2.7 trillion parameters with a 256,000 token context window, processing text, images, and audio with real-time web search built in.
Grok 5, expected imminently, will reportedly double the parameter count to 6 trillion, with native video understanding and a mixture-of-experts architecture that could push it into genuinely new territory.
The commercial traction has been equally aggressive. xAI generated roughly $300 million in revenue in 2025 through SuperGrok subscriptions priced between $30 and $300 per month, a usage-based API for developers, X platform revenue sharing, and $300 million in US Department of Defence contracts. Revenue is projected to exceed $2 billion in 2026. In January 2026, just weeks before the SpaceX acquisition, xAI closed a $20 billion Series E round at a $230 billion valuation.
This is not a side project. This is a company that has gone from zero to a quarter of a trillion dollars in valuation in under three years, and it is now backed by the most successful rocket company in history.
Colossus: The World's Largest AI Supercomputer
At the heart of xAI sits Colossus, the world's largest single-site AI training installation, located in Memphis, Tennessee.
The numbers are staggering. The initial phase brought 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs online in just 122 days. Phase two doubled that to 200,000 GPUs in only 92 days. By January 2026, xAI had purchased a third building in Memphis, expanding total capacity to 2 gigawatts with 555,000 NVIDIA GPUs, at a cost of approximately $18 billion.
To put that in perspective, 2 gigawatts is roughly the power output of two nuclear power stations. All dedicated to training AI models.
The goal is to reach 1 million GPUs. Tens of thousands of NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GB200 chips are already coming online. This is not just an incremental step forward. It is an entirely different scale of computing power, and it gives xAI the raw muscle to train models that competitors simply cannot match without similar infrastructure.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all building their own massive clusters, but none has matched Colossus for sheer single-site density. And none of those companies can launch its own satellites to extend that compute into orbit.
X: The Social Media Platform Feeding the AI
One of the most underappreciated aspects of Musk's strategy is how X, formerly Twitter, fits into the picture. The platform generates over 100 million original posts, replies, and retweets every single day. All of that data flows directly into training and improving Grok.
By June 2025, the xAI API had integrated real-time X data, including posts, trends, and user interactions. This gives Grok something no other major AI model has: genuine, real-time access to what people are talking about, thinking, and sharing right now. While ChatGPT and Claude rely on periodic web crawls and search integrations, Grok has a direct, continuous pipeline from one of the world's largest social media platforms.
The X platform's recommendation algorithm is now fully driven by Grok. The model analyses all posts in real time, including text, images, and video, to power the content feed. It is a self-reinforcing loop. X generates data, Grok learns from it, and Grok then improves the X experience, which generates more engagement and more data.
This is enabled by default. Users can opt out of sharing their data with Grok, but most do not even know the setting exists. It raises legitimate questions about consent and data privacy, but from a pure AI training perspective, it is an extraordinary advantage. No other AI company has this kind of real-time, high-volume data pipeline built directly into a consumer platform they own.
Starlink: 9 Million Subscribers and Counting
Then there is Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service, which has quietly become one of the most successful technology products in recent memory.
Starlink hit 9 million active subscribers by December 2025, up from around 4.5 million the year before. Analysts project it will double again to 18.4 million in 2026. Revenue from Starlink reached $10.4 billion in 2025, accounting for roughly 70% of SpaceX's total revenue, and is forecast to grow 80% to $18.7 billion in 2026.
The service now operates in 155 countries. It expanded into 35 new markets in 2025 alone. For millions of people in rural and underserved areas around the world, Starlink is not just a nice option. It is the only viable high-speed internet connection available.
Within the context of the xAI merger, Starlink becomes even more important. These satellites form the backbone of a future network that could beam AI compute from orbital data centres back down to Earth. Musk controls the rockets to launch the hardware, the satellite network to transmit the data, and the AI models that process it all.
The Full Stack: Rockets, Robots, and the Road to Mars
What makes this merger truly unprecedented is the breadth of vertical integration. Consider what the combined SpaceX-xAI entity now controls:
Launch capability. SpaceX is the world's dominant launch provider with reusable Falcon 9 and Starship rockets. No other company can put hardware into orbit as cheaply or as frequently.
Satellite infrastructure. Starlink's constellation of thousands of satellites provides global internet coverage and will soon serve as the data transmission layer for orbital computing.
AI research and models. xAI's Grok models, trained on the world's largest GPU cluster, compete directly with the best models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Data pipeline. X generates hundreds of millions of posts daily, providing a real-time training signal that no competitor can replicate.
Robotics. Through Tesla (another Musk company), the Optimus humanoid robot programme is advancing rapidly. Musk announced in 2025 that an Optimus robot would be sent to Mars in 2026 aboard a SpaceX Starship, testing semi-autonomous operation with communication delays of up to 24 minutes.
No single corporate entity has ever controlled this many layers of the technology stack simultaneously. From the chips training the models, to the rockets launching the hardware, to the satellites beaming the data, to the social platform generating the training signal, it is all under one roof.
The Risks and Opportunities
A deal this large comes with serious questions that deserve honest answers.
The Opportunities
The potential upside is enormous. By combining AI research with space infrastructure, the merged company could fundamentally change how computing works. Solar-powered data centres in orbit would not face the energy constraints that are already limiting AI growth on Earth. Global electricity demand for AI is growing so fast that terrestrial power grids are struggling to keep up.
For businesses, cheaper and more abundant AI compute could mean more accessible AI tools, lower costs for cloud services, and entirely new capabilities that are currently too expensive to run. It could accelerate everything from drug discovery to climate modelling to personalised education.
The vertical integration also creates enormous efficiency. Rather than relying on dozens of separate vendors for computing, networking, launches, and AI development, this single entity controls the entire stack. That means faster iteration, lower costs, and fewer bottlenecks.
xAI's rapid model improvements suggest that Grok could become a genuine alternative to ChatGPT and Claude for business use. Enterprise offerings like Grok Business and Grok Enterprise are already available, with pricing that undercuts some competitors. As the SpaceX infrastructure brings compute costs down, those prices could fall further.
The Risks
The concentration of power is the most obvious concern. One person now controls the world's largest AI supercomputer, a social media platform with hundreds of millions of users that feeds data into that AI, a satellite internet service covering 155 countries, and the only reusable rocket system capable of heavy orbital launches. That is an extraordinary amount of influence over critical global infrastructure.
There are genuine competition concerns. If SpaceX-xAI can offer AI compute at lower cost through orbital data centres, it could undercut established cloud providers and create a near-monopoly in certain segments. Regulators in the US and EU are already examining the implications.
The technical risks are also real. Space-based data centres are unproven at scale. The engineering challenges of cooling electronics in space, maintaining them without human intervention, and ensuring reliable connectivity are significant. The $1 billion monthly burn rate at xAI before the merger shows just how capital-intensive this vision is.
There are also data privacy questions that extend beyond X. As xAI's models become more capable and more deeply integrated into SpaceX's infrastructure, the question of who has access to what data, and under what terms, becomes increasingly important. The Department of Defence contracts add another dimension. When the same AI models serve both consumer chatbots and military applications, the governance questions become genuinely complex.
And then there is the single point of failure problem. All of this depends, to an uncomfortable degree, on one individual. The decisions, priorities, and attention of one person shape the trajectory of a $1.25 trillion company that spans multiple critical industries.
What This Means for Businesses Like Yours
You might be wondering what a trillion-dollar space-AI merger has to do with your business. The answer is: more than you think.
Every major shift in computing infrastructure has eventually filtered down to businesses of every size. Cloud computing started as a tool for tech giants. Now every small business uses it. Mobile internet was once a luxury. Now it is how most customers find and interact with businesses.
The SpaceX-xAI merger signals where AI is heading: towards more compute, lower costs, and wider availability. As AI infrastructure scales up, the tools built on top of it become cheaper and more capable. The chatbots, automation tools, analytics platforms, and AI assistants that businesses use today will become dramatically more powerful.
The competitive dynamics matter too. With xAI pushing hard against OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI market is becoming more competitive, not less. That competition drives down prices and drives up quality. Whether you use Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you benefit from the pressure these companies put on each other to improve.
At Original Objective, we help businesses make sense of exactly these kinds of shifts. We build AI-powered automation, custom websites, and digital solutions that help companies work smarter without needing to understand the technical details of trillion-dollar mergers. The tools change. The models improve. The infrastructure scales. Our job is to make sure your business captures the benefit of all of that without getting lost in the complexity.
The businesses that thrive are not the ones that wait for the dust to settle. They are the ones that start experimenting now, building their AI capabilities step by step so they are ready when the next wave of tools arrives.
The Bottom Line
The SpaceX-xAI merger is not just a headline about billionaire business deals. It is a signal that AI infrastructure is about to change in ways that will affect every industry and every business.
Musk now controls a company that can build AI models at the frontier of capability, train them on the world's largest supercomputer, feed them real-time data from a social media platform used by hundreds of millions of people, distribute them via satellite internet to 155 countries, and launch the hardware into orbit on reusable rockets. In under three years, xAI has gone from a provocative startup to the AI backbone of a $1.25 trillion empire.
Whether you see that as exciting, concerning, or both, one thing is clear: the pace of AI development just got significantly faster. The question for every business is not whether this will affect you. It is whether you will be ready when it does.
The Biggest Deal the World Has Ever Seen
On 2 February 2026, Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX had officially acquired xAI. The combined company is valued at $1.25 trillion, making it the largest merger in history. SpaceX is valued at roughly $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.
The deal is structured as a share exchange. One share of xAI converts into 0.1433 shares of SpaceX stock. It brings together two of Musk's most ambitious ventures under one roof, with a stated goal that sounds like science fiction: building data centres in space.
But this is not just about space. It is about creating a vertically integrated technology empire that spans AI, robotics, satellite internet, rocket launches, social media, and soon, orbital computing. No single company has ever controlled so many pieces of the technology puzzle at once.
Why This Merger Happened Now
The timing is no accident. xAI was burning through roughly $1 billion per month building out its AI infrastructure. That is a staggering burn rate, even by Silicon Valley standards. Meanwhile, SpaceX is preparing for what could be the most anticipated IPO in history, reportedly targeting mid-June 2026.
By folding xAI into SpaceX, Musk secures long-term funding for his AI ambitions through SpaceX's revenue and the forthcoming IPO. It also positions the combined entity as the ultimate AI-plus-infrastructure play for investors.
Three days before the merger announcement, SpaceX filed plans with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites designed to operate as orbital data centres. Musk estimates that within two to three years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space, using solar power for onboard computing systems.
xAI: From Challenger to Contender
To understand why this merger matters so much, you need to understand what xAI has become in a remarkably short time.
Musk founded xAI in March 2023, announcing it publicly that July. His motivation was personal. He had co-founded OpenAI years earlier but walked away, frustrated by what he saw as the organisation drifting from its original open-source mission towards closed, commercially driven development. xAI would be different, he said. It would be "maximally truth-seeking" and attempt to "understand the true nature of the universe."
In just under three years, xAI has gone from a startup with a provocative mission statement to one of the three most valuable AI companies on the planet, sitting alongside OpenAI and Anthropic.
Its flagship product is Grok, the AI model that powers everything from the chatbot on X to enterprise applications. Grok's evolution has been relentless. Grok 1 launched in late 2023 as a curiosity. Grok 2 followed in 2024 with meaningful improvements. Then came the real step change.
Grok 3, released in February 2025, was trained with 10 times the compute of its predecessor across 200,000 GPUs. xAI claimed it outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o on benchmarks for mathematical reasoning and PhD-level science problems. In July 2025, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy arrived, with xAI claiming these models outperformed all rival offerings across multiple benchmarks. The latest flagship, Grok 4.1, runs on 2.7 trillion parameters with a 256,000 token context window, processing text, images, and audio with real-time web search built in.
Grok 5, expected imminently, will reportedly double the parameter count to 6 trillion, with native video understanding and a mixture-of-experts architecture that could push it into genuinely new territory.
The commercial traction has been equally aggressive. xAI generated roughly $300 million in revenue in 2025 through SuperGrok subscriptions priced between $30 and $300 per month, a usage-based API for developers, X platform revenue sharing, and $300 million in US Department of Defence contracts. Revenue is projected to exceed $2 billion in 2026. In January 2026, just weeks before the SpaceX acquisition, xAI closed a $20 billion Series E round at a $230 billion valuation.
This is not a side project. This is a company that has gone from zero to a quarter of a trillion dollars in valuation in under three years, and it is now backed by the most successful rocket company in history.
Colossus: The World's Largest AI Supercomputer
At the heart of xAI sits Colossus, the world's largest single-site AI training installation, located in Memphis, Tennessee.
The numbers are staggering. The initial phase brought 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs online in just 122 days. Phase two doubled that to 200,000 GPUs in only 92 days. By January 2026, xAI had purchased a third building in Memphis, expanding total capacity to 2 gigawatts with 555,000 NVIDIA GPUs, at a cost of approximately $18 billion.
To put that in perspective, 2 gigawatts is roughly the power output of two nuclear power stations. All dedicated to training AI models.
The goal is to reach 1 million GPUs. Tens of thousands of NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GB200 chips are already coming online. This is not just an incremental step forward. It is an entirely different scale of computing power, and it gives xAI the raw muscle to train models that competitors simply cannot match without similar infrastructure.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all building their own massive clusters, but none has matched Colossus for sheer single-site density. And none of those companies can launch its own satellites to extend that compute into orbit.
X: The Social Media Platform Feeding the AI
One of the most underappreciated aspects of Musk's strategy is how X, formerly Twitter, fits into the picture. The platform generates over 100 million original posts, replies, and retweets every single day. All of that data flows directly into training and improving Grok.
By June 2025, the xAI API had integrated real-time X data, including posts, trends, and user interactions. This gives Grok something no other major AI model has: genuine, real-time access to what people are talking about, thinking, and sharing right now. While ChatGPT and Claude rely on periodic web crawls and search integrations, Grok has a direct, continuous pipeline from one of the world's largest social media platforms.
The X platform's recommendation algorithm is now fully driven by Grok. The model analyses all posts in real time, including text, images, and video, to power the content feed. It is a self-reinforcing loop. X generates data, Grok learns from it, and Grok then improves the X experience, which generates more engagement and more data.
This is enabled by default. Users can opt out of sharing their data with Grok, but most do not even know the setting exists. It raises legitimate questions about consent and data privacy, but from a pure AI training perspective, it is an extraordinary advantage. No other AI company has this kind of real-time, high-volume data pipeline built directly into a consumer platform they own.
Starlink: 9 Million Subscribers and Counting
Then there is Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service, which has quietly become one of the most successful technology products in recent memory.
Starlink hit 9 million active subscribers by December 2025, up from around 4.5 million the year before. Analysts project it will double again to 18.4 million in 2026. Revenue from Starlink reached $10.4 billion in 2025, accounting for roughly 70% of SpaceX's total revenue, and is forecast to grow 80% to $18.7 billion in 2026.
The service now operates in 155 countries. It expanded into 35 new markets in 2025 alone. For millions of people in rural and underserved areas around the world, Starlink is not just a nice option. It is the only viable high-speed internet connection available.
Within the context of the xAI merger, Starlink becomes even more important. These satellites form the backbone of a future network that could beam AI compute from orbital data centres back down to Earth. Musk controls the rockets to launch the hardware, the satellite network to transmit the data, and the AI models that process it all.
The Full Stack: Rockets, Robots, and the Road to Mars
What makes this merger truly unprecedented is the breadth of vertical integration. Consider what the combined SpaceX-xAI entity now controls:
Launch capability. SpaceX is the world's dominant launch provider with reusable Falcon 9 and Starship rockets. No other company can put hardware into orbit as cheaply or as frequently.
Satellite infrastructure. Starlink's constellation of thousands of satellites provides global internet coverage and will soon serve as the data transmission layer for orbital computing.
AI research and models. xAI's Grok models, trained on the world's largest GPU cluster, compete directly with the best models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Data pipeline. X generates hundreds of millions of posts daily, providing a real-time training signal that no competitor can replicate.
Robotics. Through Tesla (another Musk company), the Optimus humanoid robot programme is advancing rapidly. Musk announced in 2025 that an Optimus robot would be sent to Mars in 2026 aboard a SpaceX Starship, testing semi-autonomous operation with communication delays of up to 24 minutes.
No single corporate entity has ever controlled this many layers of the technology stack simultaneously. From the chips training the models, to the rockets launching the hardware, to the satellites beaming the data, to the social platform generating the training signal, it is all under one roof.
The Risks and Opportunities
A deal this large comes with serious questions that deserve honest answers.
The Opportunities
The potential upside is enormous. By combining AI research with space infrastructure, the merged company could fundamentally change how computing works. Solar-powered data centres in orbit would not face the energy constraints that are already limiting AI growth on Earth. Global electricity demand for AI is growing so fast that terrestrial power grids are struggling to keep up.
For businesses, cheaper and more abundant AI compute could mean more accessible AI tools, lower costs for cloud services, and entirely new capabilities that are currently too expensive to run. It could accelerate everything from drug discovery to climate modelling to personalised education.
The vertical integration also creates enormous efficiency. Rather than relying on dozens of separate vendors for computing, networking, launches, and AI development, this single entity controls the entire stack. That means faster iteration, lower costs, and fewer bottlenecks.
xAI's rapid model improvements suggest that Grok could become a genuine alternative to ChatGPT and Claude for business use. Enterprise offerings like Grok Business and Grok Enterprise are already available, with pricing that undercuts some competitors. As the SpaceX infrastructure brings compute costs down, those prices could fall further.
The Risks
The concentration of power is the most obvious concern. One person now controls the world's largest AI supercomputer, a social media platform with hundreds of millions of users that feeds data into that AI, a satellite internet service covering 155 countries, and the only reusable rocket system capable of heavy orbital launches. That is an extraordinary amount of influence over critical global infrastructure.
There are genuine competition concerns. If SpaceX-xAI can offer AI compute at lower cost through orbital data centres, it could undercut established cloud providers and create a near-monopoly in certain segments. Regulators in the US and EU are already examining the implications.
The technical risks are also real. Space-based data centres are unproven at scale. The engineering challenges of cooling electronics in space, maintaining them without human intervention, and ensuring reliable connectivity are significant. The $1 billion monthly burn rate at xAI before the merger shows just how capital-intensive this vision is.
There are also data privacy questions that extend beyond X. As xAI's models become more capable and more deeply integrated into SpaceX's infrastructure, the question of who has access to what data, and under what terms, becomes increasingly important. The Department of Defence contracts add another dimension. When the same AI models serve both consumer chatbots and military applications, the governance questions become genuinely complex.
And then there is the single point of failure problem. All of this depends, to an uncomfortable degree, on one individual. The decisions, priorities, and attention of one person shape the trajectory of a $1.25 trillion company that spans multiple critical industries.
What This Means for Businesses Like Yours
You might be wondering what a trillion-dollar space-AI merger has to do with your business. The answer is: more than you think.
Every major shift in computing infrastructure has eventually filtered down to businesses of every size. Cloud computing started as a tool for tech giants. Now every small business uses it. Mobile internet was once a luxury. Now it is how most customers find and interact with businesses.
The SpaceX-xAI merger signals where AI is heading: towards more compute, lower costs, and wider availability. As AI infrastructure scales up, the tools built on top of it become cheaper and more capable. The chatbots, automation tools, analytics platforms, and AI assistants that businesses use today will become dramatically more powerful.
The competitive dynamics matter too. With xAI pushing hard against OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI market is becoming more competitive, not less. That competition drives down prices and drives up quality. Whether you use Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you benefit from the pressure these companies put on each other to improve.
At Original Objective, we help businesses make sense of exactly these kinds of shifts. We build AI-powered automation, custom websites, and digital solutions that help companies work smarter without needing to understand the technical details of trillion-dollar mergers. The tools change. The models improve. The infrastructure scales. Our job is to make sure your business captures the benefit of all of that without getting lost in the complexity.
The businesses that thrive are not the ones that wait for the dust to settle. They are the ones that start experimenting now, building their AI capabilities step by step so they are ready when the next wave of tools arrives.
The Bottom Line
The SpaceX-xAI merger is not just a headline about billionaire business deals. It is a signal that AI infrastructure is about to change in ways that will affect every industry and every business.
Musk now controls a company that can build AI models at the frontier of capability, train them on the world's largest supercomputer, feed them real-time data from a social media platform used by hundreds of millions of people, distribute them via satellite internet to 155 countries, and launch the hardware into orbit on reusable rockets. In under three years, xAI has gone from a provocative startup to the AI backbone of a $1.25 trillion empire.
Whether you see that as exciting, concerning, or both, one thing is clear: the pace of AI development just got significantly faster. The question for every business is not whether this will affect you. It is whether you will be ready when it does.
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