SpaceX Is Quietly Becoming One of the Most Important Data Center Companies in AI. Here's What That Means for Investors
SpaceX's business now goes beyond rocket launches and internet service.
By CFP, Matt Frankel
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX +1.61%), better known as SpaceX, is a more complex business than many people believed prior to its recent IPO. In addition to its industry-leading rocket launch business, the company has the highly profitable Starlink satellite internet service and the AI-focused xAI platform.
When it comes to the xAI business, much of the investment thesis has centered around the Grok AI model and long-term aspirational projects like putting data centers into orbit. But with three major deal announcements in recent months, investors are starting to see that there is more to SpaceX's AI business than many had thought. They're also seeing that it could become the company's primary revenue driver as soon as next year.
SpaceX's three compute deals -- so far
It was a big surprise for many investors when SpaceX announced a deal with Anthropic shortly before its IPO. The AI company behind the popular Claude platforms agreed to lease about 300 megawatts of AI compute from xAI, the entire capacity of the Colossus 1 data center.
The deal terms include Anthropic paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for a three-year term (ending May 2029), which equals $15 billion in annual revenue. For context, SpaceX's entire 2025 revenue was $18.7 billion, so this deal alone was a massive needle-mover.
Next, Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL 0.85%)(GOOG 0.61%) agreed to lease about 110,000 Nvidia (NVDA 3.99%) GPUs from SpaceX facilities, paying $920 per month beginning in October. So, this deal adds about $11 billion in annualized revenue.
Just recently, Reflection AI became the company's third AI compute customer, agreeing to pay $150 per month ($1.8 billion per year) to access Nvidia AI chips at the Colossus 2 data center.
Between these three deals, SpaceX has added about $27.5 billion in annual revenue. Just for comparison, this means SpaceX just added about five times the annual revenue of cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike (CRWD +1.03%).
What's next?
This new revenue stream represents an impressive strategy pivot. The company's Grok AI model was using only about 11% of its GPU capacity, so SpaceX decided to monetize the excess capacity.
Most significantly for SpaceX investors, this adds a large stream of recurring, high-margin revenue to a business that previously had an investment thesis based on things they might be able to accomplish years in the future. With many enterprise AI companies currently unable to secure Nvidia chip allocations as quickly as they need them, it wouldn't be too surprising to see this side of the business grow significantly over the next few years.