The Federal Trade Commission has cleared Elon Musk‘s planned acquisition of Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded by three former SpaceX engineers that builds optical hardware for high-speed data center communications. The deal surfaced in an FTC filing and was first reported by Bloomberg. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Who is behind Mesh Optical Technologies
Mesh Optical came out of stealth in February after announcing a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital. The company’s three co-founders, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli, previously worked at SpaceX, where they built the optical communication links that keep thousands of Starlink satellites interconnected across low Earth orbit.
Those links use light beams to transmit data between satellites at high speed without ground infrastructure in between. After leaving SpaceX, the three engineers recognized the same problem in a different setting: the internal communications hardware inside large data centers has not kept pace with the processing power being added to them.
Most large facilities still rely on electrical-based interconnects, which carry data as electrical signals through copper cables. Optical transceivers replace copper with light pulses, transmitting data faster and consuming less energy per bit. Those two factors matter more as AI workloads push computing facilities toward the limits of their power budgets.
The company’s pitch is that the satellite experience of its founders gives it an engineering edge in designing optical hardware that performs reliably under demanding conditions.
Why SpaceX needs this deal
The FTC approval comes as SpaceX has been growing its commercial compute business. The company has signed capacity agreements with Anthropic, Google, and open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide processing power through SpaceX data centers, adding a significant new revenue stream since the company went public.
Bringing Mesh Optical in-house would give SpaceX control over a component that is becoming central to data center performance. As AI model training scales up, the bandwidth and efficiency of internal interconnects affects both speed and cost of each computation. Having an internal supplier removes dependency on external vendors for a technology the company now uses at scale.
The strategic rationale extends beyond current facilities. The acquisition could eventually improve the efficiency of SpaceX computing infrastructure in space. As the company pursues longer-term orbital ambitions, optical interconnects that already function at satellite scale would be a natural fit for computing hardware operating beyond the atmosphere.
FTC clearance and next steps
The FTC chose to expedite its review rather than open a full investigation, clearing the deal without reported conditions. Musk controls SpaceX directly, and the startup has a focused product line, which limited the antitrust scope. No closing timeline has been announced.