According to a company earnings report released on Tuesday, SpaceX has significantly increased its purchases of Tesla Motors Megapacks, spending $295 million on the battery energy storage equipment in the second quarter, bringing the year-to-date total to $329 million.
The Tesla Motors Megapacks acquired by SpaceX are industrial-grade energy storage systems used to support the operations of its xAI data center. This procurement highlights the close interconnections among Elon Musk's various companies. Musk serves as both the CEO and largest shareholder of SpaceX while also running Tesla Motors.
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence venture, xAI, acquired his social media platform X in 2025, and earlier this year, SpaceX absorbed xAI. These industrial batteries are likely to be deployed at the company's xAI data center. Before the merger between xAI and SpaceX, the AI company had already purchased $430 million worth of Megapacks for its data center. In the first quarter of this year, xAI procured only $34 million worth of this equipment.
SpaceX also disclosed in a regulatory filing that, as of December 2025, the company had purchased $131 million worth of Tesla Motors Cybertrucks at the manufacturer's suggested retail price.
Although xAI heavily relies on natural gas to power its data center—including installing dozens of unlicensed turbines at a site near the Colossus data center project in Mississippi—large batteries like the Megapack remain a critical component for data center operations. Beyond providing substantial backup power in under a second, these batteries can also supply additional electricity to GPUs when needed.
The power consumption of AI data centers is not constant but fluctuates with the demands of AI model training and inference operations. Such usage peaks can lead to hefty fees from local utility companies or overwhelm on-site generators. Batteries help smooth out these peaks, reducing costs while ensuring stable data center operations.
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