Quick Read
SpaceX’s $18.4B AI capex is a fraction of the $860B rivals plan to spend in 2026, an 80% year-over-year increase.
Amazon commits $220B and Meta up to $145B for AI this year, while SpaceX rents compute capacity to Google and Anthropic instead.
xAI’s Grok trails Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini in Apple’s App Store rankings, exposing SpaceX’s weak enterprise and consumer AI footprint.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SpaceX didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.
Someone, please tell me if I’m wrong. SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) said its capital expenditures were $18.4 billion in the quarter that just ended. Almost all of the spending is going toward AI. By the same token, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) says it will spend a ton more. Yahoo reports, “Oracle expects capital expenditures of up to $95 billion in fiscal 2027, though it expects repayments from customers for up to $25 billion of that.” And that number is small by megatech company standards.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) says capex in the current fiscal year will be $175 billion. In the current quarter, it will be $50 billion. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) says it will be $220 billion this year, which is a revision upward from the number it gave three months ago. Meta (NASDAQ: META) has put it as high as $145 billion for the year. Total across these large companies, and a few which are slightly smaller, the sum for 2026 is $860 billion, up 80% year over year.
Richard Sagredo / Shutterstock.com
I don’t understand it. The market hammered SpaceX, in part because of the AI spending plan. But they are tiny.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SpaceX didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.
It’s harder to figure out why SpaceX rents out data center capacity. Why doesn’t it use it for its own AI buildout? CNBC reports, “While SpaceX’s own models are seen as behind OpenAI and Anthropic, the company is positioning itself as an alternative cloud player by renting out the computing capacity that it is building with Nvidia chips.” Some of that appears to involve providing service to Google and Anthropic.
Here’s another thing that’s hard to understand. When it comes to enterprise software spending, OpenAI, Anthropic, and to a lesser extent companies like Microsoft and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) show up. Where is SpaceX?
Jump way across the AI industry to AI assistants? xAI’s Grok lags well behind leaders in Apple’s App Store. Those leaders include Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.