Elon Musk is one step closer to buying Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded by three former SpaceX engineers that makes hardware for fast data center communications. The Federal Trade Commission confirmed it expedited its antitrust review of the potential acquisition, which was revealed in an FTC filing and first reported by Bloomberg.

Mesh Optical emerged from stealth in February, announcing it had raised a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital. Before founding the startup, co-founders Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli developed the optical communication links that keep thousands of SpaceX's Starlink satellites talking to each other.

The Mesh team saw an opportunity to build optical transceivers for terrestrial data centers, because light-based hardware is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electrical systems. (Who knew photons could beat electrons in a race? Everyone, probably.)

SpaceX has recently signed agreements with Anthropic, Google, and open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide compute capacity at its data centers, generating a nice new revenue stream for the newly public company. Acquiring Mesh could eventually let SpaceX soup up the efficiency of its data centers, whether they're on Earth or - because why not - in space.