Grok Struggles, Elon Musk Shifts Focus to Orbital Data Centers

According to The Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has significantly underperformed expectations. The bot drew heavy criticism after calling itself “MechaHitler” and facilitating the generation of non-consensual nude images. Data shows Grok has barely gained a foothold among professionals. While usage has ticked up due to some questionable applications, its overall commercial value remains well below industry peers. This struggle has pushed xAI to shift its strategy away from pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) and toward a more aggressive infrastructure deployment plan.

xAI recently announced it would lease computing capacity from its massive “Gigafactory” data center in Memphis to rival Anthropic — despite Musk having publicly called the company “evil” on multiple occasions. Even more striking, the company is now exploring the possibility of sending similar large-scale computing clusters into space. According to the latest report from The Wall Street Journal, xAI’s parent company SpaceX has held preliminary talks with Google about deploying data centers in Earth orbit to bypass ground-based energy and space constraints.

From the vision of a “lunar data center” to sharing computing power with a competitor, xAI’s pivot highlights the real-world commercialization struggles of Grok. At the same time, SpaceX’s unique advantage in orbital infrastructure could provide the technical foundation for this new direction. However, the cost and regulatory hurdles of orbital data centers remain enormous. Whether this plan becomes the next breakthrough in AI remains to be seen.