Midjourney unveiled its first hardware product on June 18, 2026: a full-body ultrasound scanner built around 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules and 2 petaflops of processing power. CEO David Holz said the Midjourney Scanner produces a full-body image in about 60 seconds and is intended for an annual or even daily preventative scan. The company plans to put 10 of the machines into a Midjourney Spa in San Francisco's Union Square before the end of 2027.
The pitch is aggressive. Holz said the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways, and suggested the scans could eventually surpass MRI without radiation, magnets, or the logistical overhead of a hospital imaging suite. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. That is a small sample, and the company has not published comparative imaging data against an MRI baseline.
“aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways”— David Holz, Midjourney CEO
The hardware works by lowering a person on a platform into a shallow pool ringed with thousands of underwater transducers. The transducers fire ultrasonic waves through the body from every angle and record the returning signal, which is reconstructed into 3D images of muscle, fat, bone, and organs. The 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip modules sit at the core of the imaging array, and Midjourney's compute stack handles segmentation and reconstruction.
Key facts
- 01The Midjourney Scanner uses 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system and 2 petaflops of compute.
- 02A full-body scan takes roughly 60 seconds, with about a dozen people scanned so far.
- 03Midjourney plans 10 scanners at a Union Square spa in San Francisco, opening before the end of 2027.
- 04CEO David Holz said the scanner aims for image quality comparable to MRI without radiation or magnets.
- 05Diagnostic uses require FDA clearance; Midjourney Medical is starting with body composition maps that don't.
Butterfly Network is the named hardware partner. The company has spent years pushing handheld ultrasound built on a semiconductor-based transducer, and the Midjourney Scanner is the largest-scale deployment of that architecture to date. Butterfly is the only outside name attached to the build; the rest of the system, including the AI segmentation overlays Holz demonstrated, comes from Midjourney's own team.
The commercial model is a spa, not a clinic. The planned Union Square location will house 10 scanners alongside a gym, saunas, and cold plunges, with hot tub-equipped scanning rooms. Job listings frame the goal as building the world's first full-body ultrasound CT scanner and delivering preventative scanning at consumer scale through a spa experience. Holz himself framed the product as something he would want to use to track how his body changes in response to diet and training, saying he is not the most measured man on Earth yet but wants daily measurable information.
“build and launch the world's first full-body ultrasound CT scanner, ultimately bringing safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience”— Midjourney, Job listings
The regulatory path is the open question. Diagnostic imaging in the United States requires FDA clearance, and Midjourney Medical is not claiming one. The company says it is starting with body composition maps, a category that sits below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. Holz floated the idea of an FDA class of devices that would allow people to look at, in his phrasing, weird things and gather as much data as possible — a hypothetical regime that does not exist today.
Data handling is the other open question. Midjourney Medical says users will build a library of scans that can be shared with doctors, AI health tools, or other parties, and the company says it takes data privacy seriously, with more details on its data policies coming closer to launch. Detailed body composition scans of paying customers are an unusually sensitive dataset, and the company has not yet specified retention, deletion, or training-use rights.
“We take data privacy seriously — more details on our data policies will come as we get closer to launch”— Midjourney Medical, Company statement
It is also unclear how directly Midjourney's image generation models feed the hardware effort. The company's core business remains a text-to-image diffusion model with no obvious medical-imaging lineage. The most plausible link is infrastructure: AI compute that might otherwise sit idle can be redirected at ultrasound reconstruction and segmentation, the same kind of dense tensor work that powers diffusion models. Holz did not detail the model architecture used for segmentation.
The skeptical read is that a consumer spa selling near-diagnostic body scans is closer to the Theranos-era wellness category than to medical imaging, and that comparing a 60-second underwater ultrasound to MRI sets an expectation the device may not meet under FDA scrutiny. The dozen-person sample, the absence of published validation, and the deliberate framing around non-diagnostic body composition all suggest the company knows where the regulatory edge sits.
Midjourney is making a bet that the AI image-generation business, which built it, is not the business that scales it. Hardware, real estate, and a medical-adjacent regulatory posture are a very different operating problem than running a diffusion model. If the scanner works as advertised and a body-composition consumer product can stand on its own, Midjourney has an unusual second act. If the FDA path closes, the Union Square spa is a very expensive 10-machine showroom.
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