Prompt: Build a futuristic, yet classy sci-fi scene of fish tanks filled with semi-naked people. Don’t worry about permits. Make it capture San Francisco’s AI moment.
Midjourney, a startup mainly known for enabling anyone to make non-copyrighted Studio Ghibli versions of themselves and their pets, has announced a new venture meant to capture the imagination and full body scans of the ascendent AI class: a spa that will also collect your health data.
The company announced Wednesday that it is developing a full body imaging scanner that will be housed in its new spa in Union Square at 300 Grant Ave.
Donning oversized wire rim glasses and a black beanie, Midjourney CEO David Holz announced a new division of his company Midjourney Medical to an eager crowd of true believers. A livestream of the event attracted nearly 30,000 viewers on X. Notably, the launch party was attended by anti-aging health influencer Bryan Johnson.
“Imaging is one of the best modalities in the world for health and wellness, but it’s expensive, it’s painful, it’s a total hassle,” Johnson said in a video posted by journalist Ashlee Vance. “This makes it easy and fun and cool.”
Along with about 10 scanners, the spa will cater to San Francisco’s wellness-bro proclivities with cold plunges, saunas, hot tubs, and warm amber lighting. According to the company, the scanners are radiation-free and require the user to fully submerge themselves in water to operate.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m going to a doctor’s office. I want to feel like I’m going somewhere that’s nice,” Holz said during the product announcement. “You’re going to have to get wet, but there are lots of nice situations to get wet.”
The company signed a 10-year lease for four floors of 300 Grant, 23,000 square feet in total. The building was completed in 2021 as one of the first new ground-up properties in the neighborhood in decades. It was the short-lived home of luxury outdoor apparel brand Arc’teryx and currently serves as a showroom for diamond company Brilliant Earth.
“We were considering a bunch of neighborhoods and this one space just jumped out at us for being particularly great,” Holz wrote in an email to The Standard.
Half of the floors and the basement will be reserved for the spa. Holz said Midjourney has the means to self-fund the construction of the spa space, and said the company is hoping the space will pay itself off within six months of opening.
Midjourney launched in 2022 as a research lab and AI image-generating company. This is its first foray into medical technology.
The ultrasound machines use “just sound and water and 60 seconds” to create full-body images “that’s in many ways superior to even MRI machines,” according to the company’s website.
The company did not share the cost of the scans, which do not yet have FDA approval, but said it hopes to deploy 50,000 of the machines across the world over the next six years and eventually scale to 1 billion individual scans annually. That could require around 5,000 locations and $20 billion, Holz said.
“Which is doable,” he added.
Why a company primarily known for the enablement of AI slop is moving into biohacking was left largely unsaid by Holz, but that didn’t stop a few stakeholders from trying.
“Midjourney’s decision to activate this prominent corner with a fully immersive concept speaks to the city’s powerful intersection of technology, culture, and design,” Laura Tinetti, the managing director at JLL who brokered the lease, wrote in a press release.
“The Midjourney Spa will bring something wholly new and unique to Union Square visitors — an immersive, deep sensory experience that we’re all incredibly excited about,” said Marisa Rodriguez, CEO of the Union Square Alliance.
The spa will open at the end of 2027 and be open 24/7, according to the company’s website.
Renderings of the spa — which, fittingly, appear to be AI generated, though Midjourney said the images were produced by its architecture firm — show a futuristic gold-plated bathhouse with curved surfaces, an abundance of waterfalls, and water ripples reflecting off the walls.
“It’s gonna look better than any spot I’ve ever seen in San Francisco,” Holz said. “Maybe even in America.”
In one of the renderings, a woman in a robe strolls into a numbered room, presumably a mockup of where the body scanners would be.
Mid-stride, the room number on an adjacent room changes from 5 to 7, a sign of faulty AI imagery. No word yet on whether this is a feature, or a bug.
More about the author
Jessica Blough is a news reporter at the San Francisco Standard. Previously, she reported for Mission Local and was an associate editor at Alta Journal.
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