FTC gives Musk the OK to acquire SpaceX alumni startup Mesh

Before founding Mesh Optical, the startup’s co-founders, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli, developed the optical communication links that keep thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites interconnected.

The Mesh co-founders saw an opportunity to develop optical transceivers for terrestrial data centers, as light-based hardware is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electrical-based systems.

SpaceX has recently entered into agreements with Anthropic, Google, and the open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide them with compute capacity at its data centers, generating a substantial new revenue stream for the newly public company. Acquiring Mesh could eventually allow SpaceX to improve the efficiency of its data centers, whether they are located on Earth or, in the future, in space.