SpaceX Chases AI Supremacy While Absorbing a $49 Billion Share Unlock

SpaceX's first lock-up expiry released 328 million shares worth nearly $49 billion, with the stock flat as Musk pivots toward AI computing.

Elon Musk is betting that SpaceX can vault past OpenAI and claim the artificial intelligence crown within roughly six months — a claim that lands just as the company's newly public equity absorbs its first major test of market gravity.

More than 328 million shares became freely tradable on Thursday as a lock-up agreement expired, putting a block worth close to $49 billion into circulation. The stock barely flinched. In European trading, SpaceX closed at EUR 130.20, essentially flat with a marginal decline of 0.08%. But zoom out to the June listing and the picture shifts: the shares now sit about 33% below their 52-week high of EUR 194.46.

A Business Model in Mid-Transformation

The company Musk built around rockets and the Starlink satellite constellation is increasingly becoming something else — a supplier of massive computing capacity. That pivot is already visible in the numbers. Second-quarter revenue reached approximately $7.8 billion, with the AI division alone contributing $2.6 billion.

Underpinning those figures are multi-billion-dollar contracts with outside partners. Anthropic pays roughly $1.25 billion per month for access to capacity at the Colossus data center. A separate arrangement with Google adds $920 million in monthly payments for cloud and processor resources. Together, these deals hand SpaceX predictable recurring revenue — capital that Musk intends to funnel into an extraordinarily expensive buildout of proprietary computing infrastructure, targeting several gigawatts of total capacity over the medium term.

Computing Heads for Orbit

Terrestrial data centers are only part of the plan. On October 1, Google is slated to launch a test satellite aboard a Falcon rocket as part of the Transporter-18 mission, carrying its own Trillium semiconductors into orbit to assess how they withstand the environment. The long-term appeal of orbital computing is straightforward: solar panels in space capture far more energy, and the constraints of land and cooling capacity on Earth simply disappear. Cooling in a vacuum, however, introduces fresh engineering demands on radiator design.

Wall Street has greeted the transformation warmly. Morgan Stanley is holding to a price target above $200, while Mizuho reiterated an "Outperform" rating with a $200 target, calling the satellite business a dependable earnings engine. Even so, valuation remains stretched after the run-up in the shares.

The Weight of Public Markets

SpaceX now stands as a case study in a broader shift: high-tech ventures that once matured behind the shelter of private venture capital must instead justify themselves to public investors every quarter. Regulatory filings lay out the risks plainly — some initiatives rest on untested technology, and the company's operating losses remain substantial amid enormous development spending. Additional lock-up tranches are due in October, when hundreds of millions more shares will become eligible for trading.

The market is no longer content with vision alone. It wants proof that SpaceX can bridge the gap between capital-hungry rocket development and high-margin services. That verdict won't come from optimistic executive forecasts — it will be delivered on a launch pad in Texas and in the balance sheets of the quarters ahead.