"It's a no-brainer building solar-power data centers in space ... the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space, and that will be true within two years, three at the latest," Musk said(Photo: AP)A proposed merger between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI, reported exclusively by Reuters on Thursday, could give fresh momentum to Musk’s plan to launch satellite data centers into orbit as he battles for supremacy in the rapidly escalating AI race against tech giants like Alphabet’s Google, Meta and OpenAI. Here is what we know about space-based AI computing:What are space-based AI data centres? Space-based data centres – still an early-stage concept – would likely rely on hundreds of solar-powered satellites networked in orbit to handle the ‍enormous computing ⁠demands of AI systems like xAI’s Grok or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, at a time when energy-hungry Earth-based facilities are becoming increasingly costly to run. Advocates say operating above the atmosphere offers nearly constant solar power and eliminates the cooling burdens that dominate ground-based data-centre costs, potentially making AI processing far more efficient.