Elon Musk is eyeing the acquisition of Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded last year by three former SpaceX engineers that is developing hardware for faster data center communications.
potential acquisition, which was revealed in a Federal Trade Commission filing and first of all Reported by Bloombergconfirmed that the agency has expedited its antitrust review.
Mesh Optical came out of the secret in February when it announced it had raised a $50 million Series A Led by Thrive Capital.
Before founding Mesh Optical, the startup’s co-founders, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Groen-Haeberly, developed the optical communications links that keep thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites together.
The Mesh co-founders saw an opportunity to develop optical transceivers for terrestrial data centers, because light-based hardware is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electricity-based systems.
SpaceX recently signed agreements with Anthropic, Google, and open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide compute capacity at its data centers, which will generate a substantial new revenue stream for the newly public company. The acquisition of Mesh could ultimately allow SpaceX to improve the efficiency of its data centers, whether they are located on Earth or, in the future, in space.
