Musk's xAI Just Revealed Its Plan to Build AI Factories on the Moon

$1 billion in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions alone. That's what Elon Musk'sX platform just achieved, according to internal figures revealed in a rare 45-minute all-hands meeting video that xAI posted publicly yesterday. But the real jaw-dropper wasn't the revenue—it was Musk's vision of lunar AI factories and solar-scale computing clusters that could expand to other galaxies.

30 Months, Massive Scale, Major Shakeup

Since its founding just 30 months ago, xAI has achieved staggering numbers. The company's Imagine tool generates 50 million videos daily and has produced over 6 billion images in the past month alone. But there's a catch: much of X's engagement surge during this period came from AI-generated explicit content, with an estimated 1.8 million sexualized images created in just nine days.

The meeting also addressed the elephant in the room—massive layoffs that gutted much of xAI's founding team. Musk framed these as necessary reorganization moves, saying "As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve." The new structure splits into four teams: Grok chatbot (including voice), coding systems, Imagine video generation, and the ambitious Macrohard project.

Toby Pohlen, who'll lead Macrohard, described its scope: "able to do anything on a computer that a computer is able to do." His example? "There should be rocket engines fully designed by AI."

The Deepfake Dilemma

Here's where things get complicated. Those impressive generation numbers coincide with X becoming flooded with AI-generated pornography. While xAI celebrates billions of images created, critics point out that the platform's "engagement skyrocket" largely came from controversial content that many users didn't ask for.

This raises uncomfortable questions about AI success metrics. Is raw generation volume meaningful if much of it consists of problematic content? The company's internal metrics don't distinguish between legitimate creative uses and the deepfake flood that overwhelmed the platform.

From Earth to Galaxies: Musk's Cosmic AI Vision

The meeting's most audacious moment came at the end, when Musk outlined plans that sound like science fiction. Beyond space-based data centers, he envisions lunar factories manufacturing AI satellites, complete with electromagnetic catapults—essentially railguns—to launch them into space.

But Musk didn't stop there. He described AI clusters capable of "capturing significant portions of the sun's total energy output" and even "expanding to other galaxies." The scale is mind-bending: we're talking about intelligence systems that could harness stellar-level energy.

"It's difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about," Musk admitted, "but it's going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen."

Reality Check: Vision or Vaporware?

Musk's track record complicates any dismissal of these plans. SpaceX successfully made reusable rockets routine, Tesla proved electric vehicles could be mainstream, and even Neuralink is showing real progress with brain implants. But lunar manufacturing facilities and galactic AI expansion represent quantum leaps beyond current capabilities.

The timing is also telling. These grand announcements come amid significant internal upheaval and growing scrutiny over X's content moderation failures. Is this visionary leadership or strategic distraction?

Investors and employees face a peculiar challenge: betting on a company that's simultaneously generating billions of images daily (many controversial) while planning interstellar AI expansion. The gap between current operations and stated ambitions has never been wider.