A huge merger today puts the focus on powerful computers in orbit.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has just engulfed Elon Musk's AI company to form an outfit the company values at $1.5 trillion.

SpaceX is the rocket and satellite company that is a mature large-scale contractor.

XAI has more of a startup flavor and does the controversial GROC chatbot. The plan is to launch the

combined firm on the public stock market perhaps later this year. One place of potential synergy,

Musk has talked about putting power-hungry data centers required for burgeoning

artificial intelligence processing in space to use solar power up there and frigid space for cooling.

We don't know how to do this now, but other companies are experimenting.

Over at rival Google, there's a project called Suncatcher that plans to launch a test

platform into orbit early next year. I spoke to Project Suncatcher that plans to launch a test platform into orbit early next year.

I spoke to Project Suncatcher's senior director, Travis Beals, about his team's work.

Good morning.

Good morning, David.

Let's go through some of the benefits of this, crunching lots of numbers in orbit.

So I'll start with one.

No cloudy days if you're using solar power from space, right? You'll have pretty good access to the sun.

That's right. Yes. We will be launching the satellites into what's called a dawn dusk sun synchronous orbit. And the great thing about that is basically the sun always shines there.

We know that terrestrial

data centers, the ones that we drive past, run hot. It costs money on Earth to chill them out.

In space, that's, I suppose, different. It is different. The way it works is you radiate the heat

away out into space. So if you've ever stood beside, say, a campfire or a radiator or something like that,

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