Midjourney is moving beyond image generation into health and wellness hardware, unveiling a full-body ultrasound scanner and outlining plans for a multi-level spa in San Francisco’s Union Square. The new product, called the Midjourney Scanner, was presented by chief executive David Holz as the company’s first hardware launch and a step toward what he described as a broader preventative scanning platform.
The scanner is designed to create detailed internal body images using ultrasound rather than MRI. According to descriptions of the device, it uses 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip modules and captures vertical slices of the body while the person is immersed in water. Midjourney says the system is intended to map muscle, fat, bone, and organs, with image quality the company says is comparable in many ways to MRI.
That makes the project an unusually sharp departure for a company best known for AI-generated images. Midjourney has built its reputation as a research lab focused on visual AI, but the scanner announcement suggests it is now trying to translate computational imaging and product design into a physical health-tech offering. The company has not yet presented the scanner as a diagnostic medical device cleared for clinical use, and the current pitch appears centered more on body composition, monitoring, and preventative wellness than on direct medical diagnosis.
The San Francisco piece of the plan is what gives the story a distinctly local business angle. Midjourney has said its first spa location is planned for Union Square and is targeted for late 2027. Additional reporting on the project describes the concept as a four-floor, roughly 25,000-square-foot wellness venue expected to include hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, a gym, and about nine or 10 scanners.
That would place a highly unconventional AI-adjacent wellness concept in one of downtown San Francisco’s most closely watched retail districts. Union Square has spent the last several years trying to rebuild traffic and attract new experiential tenants, and a Midjourney-branded spa built around full-body scanning would be far removed from the traditional apparel-and-luxury retail mix the area has historically relied on. The project therefore looks less like a standard tech office expansion and more like a bet on experience-driven urban retail.
Holz has also framed the scanner as something that could eventually be used regularly, not just once in a while. He suggested people might use it annually or even daily to observe changes tied to diet, fitness, and health habits. That vision points to a consumer model in which scanning becomes part of a recurring lifestyle routine rather than a rare clinical event.
The scale of Midjourney’s ambitions appears to extend beyond a single spa. Additional coverage has described the company as thinking in terms of much broader deployment over time, though the public details remain limited and the technology still appears early in its commercialization process. Only a small number of people have reportedly used the scanner so far, which means the project is still at a demonstration stage rather than full rollout.
For San Francisco, the significance is twofold. First, it adds another unusual tenant concept to the evolving Union Square recovery story. Second, it shows how AI-era companies are starting to test business models that spill out of software and into physical consumer experiences. Midjourney’s scanner-and-spa plan is not a conventional Bay Area product launch, but it is exactly the kind of hybrid technology, wellness, and experiential retail bet that can reshape how downtown space gets used in the years ahead.
