Elon Musk's SpaceX has cleared a regulatory hurdle in its bid to acquire Mesh Optical Technologies, a young startup building hardware for data centers.
According to Bloomberg, the Federal Trade Commission fast-tracked its approval, giving Musk a green light to buy the company. TechCrunch reports that the FTC's sign-off gives Musk the OK to acquire what it describes as a "SpaceX alumni startup" — Mesh was founded by former SpaceX employees.
Mesh is a recent arrival. According to TechCrunch, it came out of stealth in February with a $50 million Series A funding round. Bloomberg reports the company makes high-efficiency optical transceivers for data centers.
Optical transceivers are the components that send and receive data as pulses of light over fiber, moving information between the racks of computers that fill a modern data center. As facilities scale up to handle artificial-intelligence workloads, the speed and energy efficiency of those connections has become a growing bottleneck — which is what makes a company promising "high-efficiency" parts notable.
The deal is striking for a few reasons. SpaceX is best known for rockets and its Starlink satellite-internet network, not data-center plumbing. The acquisition suggests Musk's ambitions in computing infrastructure are widening, and it keeps talent that once worked at SpaceX within his orbit.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in the source items, and the speed of the FTC's review stands out at a time when large tech deals often draw extended scrutiny.
Why it matters: The deal signals that Musk is moving deeper into the physical hardware that underpins the AI computing boom, and a quick regulatory nod shows how this niche-but-critical technology is drawing the attention of the industry's biggest players.