Close your eyes and think of SpaceX, and the image that comes to mind is likely the giant Starship rocket (unless a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk still haunts your mind).\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the biggest IPO in history, scheduled for launch this Friday, is just as much about the unwieldy tech conglomerate bottled inside the rocket ship. To justify its $1.75 trillion valuation, the company is banking on X (n\u00e9e Twitter), xAI and Starlink to soar to the moon.<\/p>\n
Critical Cargo<\/p>\n
In its S-1 filing<\/a> with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX says it has \u201cidentified the largest actionable total addressable market (\u201cTAM\u201d) in human history,\u201d worth $28.5 trillion. That\u2019s a gargantuan figure for a company that generated $18.7 billion in revenue and a nearly $5 billion net loss last year. That TAM, SpaceX says, is divided up neatly and equally between its myriad units, divisions, and subsidiaries: \u201cspace-enabled solutions\u201d accounts for $370 billion, current revenue driver Starlink accounts for $1.6 trillion, while AI accounts for \u2026 $26.5 trillion.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ok, maybe not so equally.\u00a0<\/p>\n The AI TAM is also further segmented: $2.4 trillion for AI infrastructure, $1.3 trillion in digital ads and consumer subscriptions and \u2026 $22.7 trillion in \u201centerprise applications.\u201d You\u2019re essentially betting that xAI\u2019s Grok model will leapfrog competitors and emerge at the forefront of a future paradigm-shifting AI revolution. In the present, Grok\u2019s relative underuse compared to rival models has allowed the company to rent out excess compute power. Grok\u2019s biggest rivals are lining up as customers:\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, rival Anthropic inked a deal<\/a> to pay $1.25 billion per month (you thought your rent was high) through 2029 to be the sole tenant of Colossus 1, a.k.a. the world\u2019s largest data center that xAI built in Memphis, Tennessee to train Grok back in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last week, Google followed suit, agreeing to pay $920 million per month<\/a> for access to SpaceX data centers; the deal runs through September 2029, though both companies will have the ability to opt out starting next year, SpaceX said in a filing<\/a> last week. Note: Google\u2019s parent Alphabet is a longtime SpaceX investor and and one of its largest institutional investors, holding a roughly 6% stake in the company.<\/p>\n Goldman Sachs, the IPO\u2019s lead investment bank<\/a>, has recently pitched institutional investors on a vision of the company\u2019s AI revenue ballooning to $322 billion by 2030, about 100x the division\u2019s 2025 revenue. SpaceX, meanwhile, has pitched the creation of \u201corbital data centers\u201d as another key growth channel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Link Up: It wouldn\u2019t be the first time SpaceX grounded itself in the sturdy economics of operating as a futuristic utilities player. Starlink accounted for more than 60% of all SpaceX revenue last year, and Third Bridge sector analyst John Conca told The Daily Upside it is reasonable to expect its subscriber base of mostly rural clients could grow from around 12 million to around 30 million as it matures into a true wireless alternative with the further development of \u201cdirect-to-device\u201d technology. Telecom companies are taking notice; last month, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile formed a joint venture<\/a> to employ satellites to address rural coverage gaps. In the meantime, Conca said that Starship remains the biggest inhibitor of Starlink\u2019s ceiling. The same could be said for any plans for orbital data centers. Maybe the SpaceX IPO is all about the rocket ships after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Close your eyes and think of SpaceX, and the image that comes to mind is likely the giant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[53,85,140,132,212,658,9284,8054,6326,2899],"class_list":["post-67032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-xai","tag-anthropic","tag-data-center","tag-elon-musk","tag-google","tag-space","tag-spacex","tag-starlink","tag-twitter","tag-x","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}