xAI: How Musk's AI Company Is Powering Its Data Centers With Natural Gas
Elon Musk is changing his energy strategy. His company xAI is turning to natural gas instead of solar panels, while SpaceX is developing orbital data centers. That runs counter to his earlier public promises of a solar-electric economy of the future.
AI-processed from TechCrunch; edited by Hamidun News
xAI, Elon Musk's company that is building a large language model to compete with ChatGPT and Deepseek, has made a significant shift in its energy strategy: instead of developing solar power, its data centers are moving mainly to natural gas.
What is xAI?
xAI is an Elon Musk company that develops large language models (neural networks for text) and competes with ChatGPT and Deepseek.
Why did xAI abandon solar energy?
According to the company, natural gas lets it bring data center capacity online faster and at lower cost than installing solar panels and battery systems.
- Nov 1, 2026OpenAI Rewrites GPT Behavior Rules: Five Values and a Chain of Command
- Oct 29, 2026Gemini 4 Carbon tops independent rankings, but only cyber defenders can use it
- Oct 29, 2026Study: A Single Random Failure Makes AI Agents Abandon a Working Tool 11.6% of the Time
- Oct 29, 2026SpaceX Lands $40B for GPUs From Apollo and Predicts Extinction for Neoclouds
Key Questions Answered
What is xAI?
xAI is an Elon Musk company that develops large language models (neural networks for text) and competes with ChatGPT and Deepseek.
Why did xAI abandon solar energy?
According to the company, natural gas lets it bring data center capacity online faster and at lower cost than installing solar panels and battery systems.
Test Frontier LLMs & Autonomous Agents in One Workspace
Run Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6, Gemini 3.1, and DeepSeek side-by-side in Nomad AI (nomadnet.ai) — unified model routing, deep research, and multimodal workflows under one subscription.
The AI world, distilled — once a week
Seven stories that actually mattered, hand-picked. No noise, no reposts, no press releases.
Done! Check your inbox for a confirmation.