The company's pivot toward offering hardware access to rivals could hamstring its own AI goals
SpaceX, long a provider of launch access to Earth's orbit as well as satellite communications, is making an artificial-intelligence pivot.
SpaceX's latest point of pride is its pivot toward becoming a provider of artificial-intelligence compute. But this new twist comes with its own slew of risks.
Over the last two months, SpaceX has notched deals with AI startups Reflection and Anthropic, as well as with Google parent Alphabet $(GOOG)$ $(GOOGL)$. In return for some badly needed cash, SpaceX is giving those companies access to its expensive AI hardware.
Theoretically, SpaceX stands to make tens of billions of dollars from the three compute deals. "AI compute is the growth wildcard in the SpaceX story," Tejas Dessai, director of thematic research at Global X, said in a recent research note.
Alphabet is on the hook for $920 million a month from October 2026 through June 2029, while Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.25 billion from July of this year through May 2029. Reflection is paying the least, $150 million a month, after an initial ramp-up period, from this July through 2029.
Alphabet's access to SpaceX's data centers will ramp up through September at a "reduced fee," according to SpaceX. The deal with Anthropic has a similar provision, with the AI lab paying SpaceX a reduced fee for access in May and June.
Even taking into account those reduced fees in the short term, SpaceX could net as much as $900 million from Reflection, $2.76 billion from Alphabet and $7.5 billion from Anthropic - more than $11 billion combined - by the end of this year. In 2025, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue from its three business segments.
Those deals are a "saving grace" for SpaceX's valuation, bearish CFRA analyst Keith Snyder told MarketWatch. It gives the company a "lifeline" and buys it time to develop its own AI models, he said.
In 2025, SpaceX's AI division posted $3.2 billion worth of revenue against a $6.35 billion operational loss, making it the company's worst performing segment. It generated $818 million in revenue against a $2.47 billion loss last quarter.
The new deals come with a big caveat, in that they could be discarded after just a few months. Each deal gives both SpaceX and the other party the option to call it quits as long as they provide 90 days' notice after the first three months - a clause sought after by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in at least one of the deals.
"We won't leave them hanging and will provide a reasonable off-ramp, but if compute gets super tight I said we might need it back at some point," Musk wrote in a post on X last month, describing a clause in SpaceX's deal with Anthropic.
Some of the other companies have their own reasons to potentially scrap the deals too. Anthropic, despite its push to source as much compute as possible, may decide to stop funneling its cash to a rival.
Google also has plenty of its own compute and may choose to reallocate its funds as it brings more capacity online. The search giant ended 2025 with a significant lead over rival hyperscalers Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Meta Platforms (META) and Amazon.com (AMZN) in terms of compute, according to estimates from Epoch AI. Google has said the deal would ensure it has the capacity to meet demand for its Gemini Enterprise platform.
So far this month, Google has said it would invest $1.5 billion to expand a data center in Alabama and announced plans for a new data center in Texas. In May, the company said it would invest $15 billion on infrastructure in Missouri, including a new data center. It's planning to book capital expenditures of between $180 and $190 billion this year - double what it spent in 2025 - most of which will be dropped on infrastructure.
Due to timing, however, SpaceX is likely to record revenue from each of those deals through the end of 2026. The sole exception could be Google, which has the option to nix its deal after a one-month grace period if SpaceX can't hold up its end of the bargain by the end of September.
High-risk, low-margins
Another issue at hand is what the deals mean for SpaceX's own models. As Musk alluded to, if SpaceX hands out compute like candy, then things could get tight. Compute, after all, is one of the most sought-after resources in the AI race, along with talent.
"My biggest concern is that they may be hamstringing themselves in developing their model," CFRA's Snyder said.
According to Pitchbook analyst Franco Granda, SpaceX has leased out some 73% of the existing capacity at its Colossus I and Colossus II data-center complexes and half of planned capacity to Google and Anthropic. It's unclear exactly how much capacity has been allotted to Reflection, but it has purchased access to some Nvidia (NVDA) GB300 platforms and supporting hardware at Colossus II.
Some capacity has also been reserved for Cursor, the AI coding startup that SpaceX plans to acquire for $60 billion by the end of the third quarter. The companies have been working together on new AI models since April, with Cursor using SpaceX's data centers to solve its lack of access to compute.
Dig deeper: Social media declared Cursor dead. Then SpaceX handed the AI startup a $60 billion lifeline.
That partnership, and the subsequent planned acquisition, was SpaceX "effectively" conceding that its frontier model is lagging behind the pack, Granda said in a research note. SpaceX and Cursor are planning to release a new model "soon," according to SpaceX, which could give it a boost in the AI-model arena. Cursor also will likely help juice SpaceX's AI revenue.
However, the pivot to a neocloud model also brings up questions about SpaceX's margin profile, CFRA's Snyder noted. "I can't imagine it's a high-margin business," he said. "It's got to be pretty slim."
-William Gavin
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 27, 2026 08:00 ET (12:00 GMT)
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