The Biggest IPO in History Is Also an AI Story

When SpaceX filed its long-awaited IPO on Wednesday, the numbers told a story bigger than rockets. The company that disrupted aerospace is now positioning itself as an AI infrastructure giant. And the numbers behind that positioning are staggering.

SpaceX expects to raise approximately $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history when it lists on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX later this year.

Starlink Still Pays the Bills

Despite all the AI ambition, SpaceX remains fundamentally a satellite internet company. Starlink generated roughly $11 billion in revenue last year, accounting for more than half of the company's total revenue of over $18 billion.

The company lost about $4.9 billion in 2025. That brought total cumulative losses since founding to more than $37 billion.

The AI Pivot Costs $20 Billion a Year

Here is where the IPO filing gets interesting. SpaceX directed approximately 60 percent of its capital spending in 2025 to its AI division, which comes to around $20 billion. That division houses the Grok chatbot following Elon Musk's merger of xAI into SpaceX.

The AI division lost billions last year. Revenue grew about 22 percent, a figure that trails the growth rates reported by other frontier AI labs.

SpaceX identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history at $28.5 trillion. The company attributes $22.7 trillion of that to enterprise AI applications.

Anthropic has committed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for AI compute capacity through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee.

Starship Is the Load-Bearing Column

Much of the company's future rests on Starship, the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket that has experienced a series of explosions and technical revisions over the past several years. The 12th Starship launch is expected as early as this week.

SpaceX expects Starship to begin payload delivery to orbit in the second half of 2026, leaving little margin for delay. If that milestone is hit, SpaceX plans to use Starship to launch Starlink broadband satellites in H2 2026 and next-generation V2 mobile satellites in 2027.

The rocket program cost SpaceX $3 billion in R&D during 2025 alone, plus another $930 million in Q1 2026.

A Legal Bag of $530 Million

The filing contains 36 pages of risk factors and details legal battles SpaceX faces following the absorption of Musk's AI and social media companies. The company estimates those fights will likely cost $530 million.

What This Means for Investors

The SpaceX IPO is not a pure-play aerospace story. It is a bet on AI infrastructure at planetary scale, backed by the only rocket company with a proven record of reusing its vehicles. Starlink provides the cash. Starship provides the reach. xAI provides the narrative.

The question is whether an AI division losing billions can grow fast enough to justify a valuation that exceeds the entire German stock market index.

SpaceX will begin formal marketing around June 4 and could price as early as June 11, according to Reuters.

Sources: TechCrunch (May 20, 2026), Reuters (May 20, 2026)

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