New Delhi, Feb. 9 -- Elon Musk is joining his space exploration and artificial intelligence ventures into a single company before what's expected to be a massive initial public offering for the business later this year.

His rocket venture, SpaceX, announced on Monday that it had bought xAI in an effort to help the world's richest man dominate the rocket and artificial intelligence businesses. The deal will combine several of his offerings, including his AI chatbot Grok, his satellite communications company Starlink, and his social media company X.

Musk has talked repeatedly about the need to speed development of technology that will allow data centers to operate in space. He believes that will help overcome the problem of huge costs in ...