Musk Wins FTC Approval to Acquire Optical Startup Mesh, Targeting AI Data Center Bottlenecks

Elon Musk has secured Federal Trade Commission approval to acquire Mesh Optical Technologies Corp., a startup founded by former SpaceX engineers that builds optical transceivers for AI data centers.

The FTC cleared the deal under its antitrust review process — transaction number 20261601, with Musk listed as the acquirer. The approval clears one of the final regulatory hurdles for the acquisition, which fits into Musk’s broader push to expand his infrastructure footprint and accelerate his acquisition strategy.

Mesh Optical Technologies designs optical transceivers that convert electrical signals into light, allowing data to move between servers and GPUs at speeds that copper cabling can’t match. In modern high-performance computing systems, traditional copper wires hit physical limits on bandwidth, speed, and heat dissipation. Mesh’s approach sidesteps those constraints entirely by using light pulses instead of electrons.

The company completed a $50 million Series A round in February 2026 to scale its high-speed data transmission architecture. Both the funding round and the acquisition signal growing demand for alternatives to copper interconnects as hyperscale AI clusters push data center infrastructure to its limits.

For Musk, the deal adds a piece of the optical connectivity puzzle to a portfolio that already spans AI computing — through xAI — and space-based infrastructure through SpaceX. The acquisition comes as data center operators race to solve the interconnect bottleneck, which has become one of the most stubborn physical constraints in scaling AI training clusters. Every major cloud provider is pouring resources into optical interconnects, and Musk’s move puts him directly in that race.