SpaceX Prices IPO While Locking Large AI Compute Deals

SpaceX is taking its rocket and satellite business public while positioning itself as a major AI infrastructure provider. Reuters reports a planned $135 per-share IPO price targeting roughly $75 billion, which would rank among the largest offerings on record, with reported investor interest running well above the target.

The IPO thesis leans heavily on data-center revenue. The New York Times reports a roughly $30 billion arrangement in which Google pays about $920 million per month for capacity at xAI data centers, covering on the order of 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs beginning October 2026. SpaceX's filing also describes an Anthropic contract worth about $1.25 billion per month through May 2029.

That Anthropic figure is contested. CNBC and the Financial Times report that Elon Musk publicly described the arrangement as a "180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation thereafter," which is far shorter and less certain than the multi-year commitment implied by the prospectus. The gap matters: whether Anthropic pays roughly $15 billion a year for three years or substantially less over a few months changes the valuation case, and observers have noted the S-1 and Musk's statements cannot both be fully accurate.

Regardless of how the Anthropic terms resolve, the structure of these deals is significant for AI practitioners. Multi-year, fixed-fee compute contracts move capacity risk off model builders and onto infrastructure providers, and the scale of the dollar figures signals how capital-intensive frontier AI has become. The orbital and terrestrial data-center build-out also ties AI capacity expansion to energy and hardware supply chains that sit outside traditional cloud procurement.