Musk secured FTC clearance in four days to buy Mesh Optical Technologies, a data center connectivity startup founded by former SpaceX engineers that emerged from stealth just four months ago. The Federal Trade Commission granted early termination of its antitrust review on June 25, according to the agency's filings, with Musk listed as the acquiring party under transaction number 20261601. Bloomberg first reported the deal.
Mesh's three co-founders, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli, built the optical communication links that keep thousands of Starlink satellites interconnected before leaving SpaceX last year to start the company. They are developing optical transceivers that replace traditional copper cables in data centers, converting electrical signals into light for faster data transfer with lower power consumption, according to TechCrunch. The startup closed a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital in February 2026, the same month it came out of stealth.
Four months later, Musk is acquiring it. That velocity matters. Mesh's optical technology directly addresses a bottleneck Musk faces across his empire.
xAI is building what he has called the world's most powerful AI training cluster. Tesla is expanding its Dojo supercomputer for autonomous driving.
Both require massive interconnects between GPUs and servers, exactly what Mesh's optical transceivers solve. For SpaceX, the deal has a dual purpose. The company recently signed agreements with Anthropic, Google, and open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide compute capacity at its data centers, generating a new revenue stream for the freshly public aerospace giant.
Acquiring Mesh could improve data center efficiency on Earth and, eventually, in orbital environments. SpaceX's post-IPO strategy includes deploying orbital AI compute clusters through a planned network of up to one million satellites.
Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed. SpaceX stock fell roughly 17% this week amid broader market movement. The deal marks the latest consolidation in Musk's expanding hardware infrastructure portfolio, bringing optical networking expertise in-house at a moment when AI data center capacity is the most constrained resource in tech.
