SpaceX shares climbed 24.5% over two trading days after the first wave of employee share unlocks released about 912 million shares into the market, a result that ran against expectations for a sharp post-unlock selloff.
The move followed another headline from Elon Musk’s group of companies. On Aug. 7, SpaceX and Tesla said they would invest $16.8 billion to build Terafab, a large AI chip manufacturing complex in Texas.
Terafab targets AI chip production at scale
According to the announcement, Terafab will cover 100 million square feet and is designed to integrate manufacturing, packaging, and testing for advanced logic chips and memory chips. The project is aimed at reducing dependence on bottlenecks in the global semiconductor supply chain.
SpaceX and Tesla said the facility is meant to support more than 1 terawatt, or TW, of computing demand across Musk’s broader ecosystem. The output is expected to split into two streams. One will go to SpaceX for high-power, radiation-hardened processors used in orbital data centers. The other will go to Tesla for edge inference chips tied to the Optimus humanoid robot and Cybercab autonomous driving.
The Texas government has also allocated a $30 million grant for the project.
Starmind would move data center infrastructure into orbit
SpaceX is also pushing a space-based computing plan with Nvidia under the Starmind project. The effort would place data center capacity in orbit, expanding AI infrastructure beyond terrestrial facilities.
The plan calls for next-generation Starlink satellites and dedicated computing platforms to carry Nvidia’s Rubin GPU and Vera CPU architectures. The concept is to use low-gravity conditions in low Earth orbit and solar energy in shadow-free areas to run edge training and inference for remote sensing data in space, then distribute the output globally through inter-satellite laser links with low latency.
The pitch is that orbital infrastructure could avoid some of the power and cooling constraints faced by ground-based data centers. Even so, major obstacles remain, including hardware reliability, space radiation, communication latency, maintenance, and launch costs. No company has yet shown that large-scale orbital data centers can beat land-based facilities on economics or operating efficiency.
Unlock wave expands float, but the stock keeps rising
The next major variable for SpaceX stock is the end of post-IPO lockups and the resulting increase in supply.
The first unlock arrived on Aug. 6, when about 912 million shares became eligible for trading. That amount equaled 140% of the initial float and lifted the tradable share ratio from less than 5% to about 12%.
Under normal conditions, a jump in supply of that size would strain market demand and pressure the stock in the short term. So far, that has not happened. Bloomberg said the market had already expected selling pressure in the hundreds of billions of dollars and had priced in part of the effect ahead of time.
More shares are still on the way. Bernstein data shows the first unlock allowed roughly 20% of restricted insider shares to be sold. After that, shares equal to about 7% of total share capital are set to unlock in stages before October, followed by another round after third-quarter earnings. Bernstein expects the public float could rise to about 40% of total shares by December, when the 180-day lockup period ends.
That schedule matters because early employees and executives tend to have low cost bases, which can increase the incentive to sell. A staggered release of stock into the market leaves a continuing supply overhang.
Q2 results beat expectations as AI revenue doubles
One day before the first unlock, on Aug. 5, SpaceX reported its second-quarter earnings.
The company posted $7.814 billion in revenue, up 92% from a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA reached $3.538 billion, with a margin of 45.3%. Backlog surged to $47.5 billion, up $20 billion from the prior quarter, and about 56% of that amount is expected to convert into revenue within the next year. All three indicators came in well above Wall Street consensus estimates.
The quarter also showed a shift in SpaceX’s growth mix. Launch services, long a core driver of the business, are gradually giving way to AI infrastructure and Starlink enterprise and government subscriptions.
AI revenue reached $2.56 billion in the quarter, doubling from the previous quarter. The main contributor was supercomputing hosting and cloud services provided to AI companies including Anthropic. That shift is beginning to alter how investors value the company. SpaceX is no longer being judged only as a space company; it is increasingly being viewed as a potential player in AI infrastructure.
Bears focus on cash burn while bulls argue the AI business is mispriced
The combination of a large unlock and fresh earnings has turned SpaceX into one of the most contested names on Wall Street.
Data from S3 Partner shows more than 250 million SpaceX shares have been sold short, putting it ahead of Tesla and making it one of the largest short positions in the US stock market.
For bearish investors, the issue is not just the flood of newly tradable shares. It is also the pace of spending. SpaceX reported $18.37 billion in capital expenditures in Q2, with more than $15.8 billion directed toward AI computing infrastructure and chip research and development. That pushed quarterly net cash outflow to $15.96 billion.
From the short side, that level of spending carries a large amount of uncertainty around the return timeline. The bear case is built on two pressures arriving at once: heavy stock supply and aggressive cash consumption.
On the other side, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America have kept a bullish stance.
Under Deutsche Bank’s valuation framework, the median combined value of SpaceX’s launch and satellite broadband businesses is about $1.35 trillion, compared with the company’s current market capitalization of $1.75 trillion. By that math, the market is assigning only about $400 billion to the AI business. Deutsche Bank argues that this gap does not reflect the segment’s growth potential and amounts to a valuation mismatch. It also said a large government or sovereign-level AI partnership after the unlock period could become a positive catalyst for the stock.
Bank of America also reiterated its bullish view, saying SpaceX has deep vertically integrated moats across space logistics, space-based communications, and computing hardware. In its view, the unlock period may create a rare strategic entry point for long-term institutional investors.
2027 compute targets could exceed 10 GW, but the spending burden is heavy
Musk said on the earnings call that SpaceX has a conservative target to add 6 gigawatts to 8 gigawatts of incremental computing capacity by 2027, and that upside could exceed 10 GW.
SemiAnalysis estimates that if SpaceX surpasses 10 GW of computing capacity in 2027, annual revenue could reach $300 billion. But using a rough capital expenditure figure of about $50 billion per GW, total capex by 2027 could run from $300 billion to $500 billion. The 10 GW goal would also face practical constraints including land approvals, gas supply, and equipment delivery.
For now, SpaceX is balancing several forces at once: continuing share unlocks through December, concentrated short interest, and major pressure on cash flow from its spending program. At the same time, it is extending its business from launch dominance into space-based AI computing and semiconductor manufacturing. The central question for investors is whether those large bets on compute, chips, and orbital infrastructure can be turned into durable revenue and profit growth.