FTC clears – The FTC has expedited its antitrust review of a potential acquisition tied to Elon Musk of Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded last year by three former SpaceX engineers to build optical hardware for fast data center communications. Mesh raised $50 mi
Elon Musk’s interest in a new acquisition just moved from speculation to regulator-validated momentum.
The Federal Trade Commission has given the go-ahead to proceed with a potential bid to acquire Mesh Optical Technologies. a startup founded by three former SpaceX engineers and focused on fast data center communications. The development surfaced in an FTC filing and was first reported after the agency confirmed it expedited its antitrust review.
Mesh Optical Technologies was founded last year. and it broke cover in February with a major funding milestone: a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital. The company’s core idea—building optical transceivers—maps directly onto a long-running trend in computing hardware: light-based systems that can move data faster and use energy more efficiently than traditional electrical approaches.
The people behind the project are not newcomers to the space communications ecosystem. Mesh’s co-founders—Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli—worked on the optical communication links that help keep thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites interconnected.
That background is at the heart of why the acquisition is drawing attention. Mesh’s founders saw an opening to bring similar light-based technology to terrestrial data centers. If the deal goes through, it could also align with where SpaceX has been headed lately: into selling compute capacity.
SpaceX has entered into agreements with Anthropic, Google, and the open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide compute capacity at its data centers. Those arrangements are generating a substantial new revenue stream for the newly public company.
Acquiring Mesh could eventually translate that AI compute business into better operating efficiency—improving data center performance whether those facilities are on Earth or, in the future, in space.
FTC Elon Musk Mesh Optical Technologies SpaceX antitrust review optical transceivers data center communications Series A Thrive Capital Starlink Anthropic Google Reflection AI