Where the Money Flows in the Prospectus
SpaceX's target valuation for this IPO is about $1.75 trillion, vaulting it into the ranks of the world's most valuable companies. But more worth reading than the valuation is the capital structure in the prospectus: Starlink satellite internet contributes the bulk of the company's revenue (about 60% in 2025), with subscriber count up around 60% in a year, and these profits are increasingly being used to fill xAI's enormous cash burn. In February 2026, SpaceX absorbed xAI at a roughly $250 billion valuation, with the combined entity valued at about $1.25 trillion—the largest merger in history. A rocket-and-satellite company now simultaneously carries a cash-devouring AI lab.
Why Bind the Two Together
Musk's reason is direct: he wants to build "orbital data centers." Move AI compute into space, powered by satellite solar energy, cooled by the vacuum, and interconnected at high speed via lasers between satellites, bypassing ground data centers' bottlenecks in power and land. SpaceX's cheap reusable rockets plus mass-production satellite capability happen to be an entry ticket others don't have, and the official word is deployment could begin as early as 2028. The story is big enough, but keep some clarity: a pre-IPO company has an incentive to tell the fullest vision, and orbital cooling, radiation, and cost are all unproven hard bones. For onlookers, the point most worth remembering about this deal is—AI competition ahead will be about not just models, but who grips the longer chain of compute, power, and launch capability.
via: CNBC