SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) outwardly focuses on rocket launches and its bleeding-edge Starlink satellite internet service. But CEO Elon Musk and the company are betting heavily on another, non-so-intuitive gamble — AI.
Buried in the S-1 prospectus SpaceX filed on Wednesday is the largest total addressable market ever claimed in a public-company offering: $28.5 trillion, which the filing describes as the “largest actionable” market opportunity “in human history.”
Only $370 billion of that comes from launch and other space-enabled services. Another $1.6 trillion comes from Starlink-based connectivity. The remaining $26.5 trillion, nearly 90% of the opportunity, is artificial intelligence.
Essentially, Musk and SpaceX are asking investors to value the company as a vertically integrated AI platform that happens to launch rockets.
“SpaceX is no longer a space company in the traditional sense,” Chad Anderson, founder and CEO of Space Capital, told Yahoo Finance. “It’s a vertically integrated AI company competing with hyperscalers and aiming to own the full stack.”
After SpaceX absorbed Musk’s other company, xAI, in February 2026 and restated its results, consolidated 2025 revenue reached $18.7 billion — growth of more than 30% — but the year resulted in a loss from operations of nearly $2.6 billion. The operating loss, Anderson said, is the cost of building two new businesses at once.
“Revenue grew 30%+ to almost $19 billion. Starlink threw off over $4 billion in operating income,” Anderson said. “Net loss due to investment in growth — AI and Starship. This is a company with a lot of upside ahead.”
That investment led to big capex spends. SpaceX spent $20.7 billion in 2025, with $12.7 billion going into AI — data centers, GPUs, and the COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II training clusters. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, AI capex hit $7.7 billion.
But the prospectus discloses there is some upside to the AI thesis: AI lab Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), a competitor to xAI’s Grok model, has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for compute capacity.
At full ramp, that is roughly $15 billion of annualized revenue from a single customer, monetizing infrastructure SpaceX has already built. SpaceX says it expects similar contracts in the future.
The overall investment thesis, however, still hinges on what SpaceX is known for — rockets.
The prospectus lists any failure or delay in scaling Starship as its top risk factor, because Starship enables next-generation Starlink satellites, direct-to-cell connectivity, and orbital AI compute.
