SpaceX filed its public S-1 on May 20, setting up a June Nasdaq debut at roughly a $1.75 trillion valuation and a raise of as much as $80 billion — the largest IPO ever attempted. Buried in the prospectus is the first hard look at the financials of xAI, the AI unit SpaceX absorbed in February 2026: about $3.2 billion in 2025 revenue against a roughly $6.4 billion operating loss, on some $12.7 billion of capital expenditure.
That single disclosure reframes the offering. SpaceX is selling a bundle — rockets, Starlink, a social platform, and frontier AI — in which the profitable connectivity business ($11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, up ~50% year over year, at a 63% segment EBITDA margin) is effectively underwriting xAI's burn. Group net loss landed near $4.9 billion for 2025, and Q1 2026 capex of $7.7 billion implies a run rate north of $30 billion a year.
xAI's burn, on the record
For anyone benchmarking frontier-lab economics, the numbers are a rare primary source. xAI's Q1 2026 revenue was reported at $818 million with a $2.47 billion operating loss — a roughly 3-to-1 spend ratio that dwarfs the gross-margin profiles competitors have started publishing. Unlike privately held Anthropic or OpenAI, an SPCX listing would put Grok's unit economics under quarterly SEC scrutiny, including segment-level capex and depreciation on a GPU fleet that turns over fast.
The Anthropic deal, in writing
The filing also formalizes a compute arrangement reported earlier: roughly $1.25 billion per month from May 2026 through May 2029, about $45 billion total, for capacity on the Colossus clusters in Memphis (220,000-plus NVIDIA GPUs, ~300 MW). The contract is cancellable on 90 days' notice by either side, and Anthropic retains ownership of its models, content, and data — a structure worth noting for any enterprise negotiating long-dated capacity reservations against volatile supply.
Orbital compute as a forward bet
SpaceX uses the S-1 to float an orbital data-center program: a space-based Colossus drawing 1 GW-plus, with first deployment floated as early as 2028 and a logistics requirement of roughly a million metric tons to orbit per year — thousands of Starship flights. It is a speculative line item, but it signals where Musk wants the vertically integrated launch-to-inference stack to go.
What changes for builders
Musk retains 85.1% voting control through dual-class shares, so public investors get exposure without governance leverage. The practical takeaway for infra teams: a fourth hyperscale-class compute supplier is about to face public-market discipline, and its filings will expose GPU economics the rest of the field keeps private. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the offering, with BofA, Citi, and JPMorgan as joint bookrunners; pricing is expected around June 11.
