Elon Musk is mulling an acquisition of Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded last year by three former SpaceX engineers developing hardware for fast data center communications.
The potential acquisition, disclosed in a Federal Trade Commission filing and first reported by Bloomberg, confirmed that the agency had expedited its antitrust review.
Mesh Optical came out of secrecy in February when it announced it had raised a $50 million Series A round led by Thrive Capital.
Before founding Mesh Optical, the startup’s co-founders Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos and Serena Grown-Haeberli developed optical communications links that interconnect thousands of SpaceX Starlink satellites.
The Mesh co-founders saw an opportunity to develop optical transceivers for terrestrial data centers because optical-based hardware is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electrical-based systems.
SpaceX recently signed deals with Anthropic, Google and open source AI developer Reflection AI to provide computing capacity in its data centers, creating a significant new revenue stream for the newly public company. Acquiring Mesh will eventually allow SpaceX to improve the efficiency of its data centers, whether they are on Earth or in space in the future.
