Commentary: SpaceX’s capital needs are out of this world

While SpaceX held almost US$24 billion of cash and short-term marketable securities at the end of March, on current form even tens of billions of dollars of IPO proceeds wouldn’t last long.

As a standalone company SpaceX was “in many respects a magnificent business”, PitchBook senior research analyst Franco Granda tells me. “But after incorporating xAI it’s not the same company anymore. The pace of spending is concerning.” Founded in 2023, xAI has already raised more than US$40 billion to try to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

xAI’s Grok chatbot is struggling to keep up with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei’s creations. SpaceX has had more luck renting out spare data-center capacity. Anthropic has agreed to pay it US$1.25 billion a month for computing power.

This means SpaceX has become both an AI laboratory and a cloud provider like CoreWeave, with the added twist that it may one day operate data centers in space. While Musk’s engineers have often proved doubters wrong, it’s unclear how orbital data centres would be repaired or upgraded.

These ambitions will be astonishingly expensive and Musk isn’t stopping there: SpaceX also wants to build its own chipmaking plant, reducing its reliance on industry leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics. While another of his companies, Tesla, will help fund that extraordinarily complex endeavour, it may end up costing more than US$100 billion. And SpaceX is already burning through prodigious amounts of cash, while its debts have swelled to about US$29 billion. 

On a consolidated basis, the company’s capital spending totalled more than US$20 billion in 2025, with most of that coming from the AI division. That’s more than the entire business’s US$18.7 billion of revenue that year. 

During the first quarter of 2026, capex increased to more than US$10 billion, double the group’s revenue in the same period.