SpaceX's Nasdaq debut: from satellite internet to orbital data centers
SpaceX is going public on Nasdaq at an IPO price of $135 per share, valuing the company at $1.75 trillion, with $75 billion raised in the offering — more than double Saudi Aramco's previous record of $29.4 billion — making it the largest IPO in history. Underwriters reportedly slashed fees unusually low, a bet on winning future SpaceX business.
SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 effectively dominates the global commercial launch market, accounting for roughly 50% of all worldwide launches last year. Its reusability program drew skepticism early on from rivals like ULA, who argued there wasn't enough launch demand to justify it economically, but the Block 5 version stabilized reuse operations after 2018. The real bottleneck turned out to be demand — cheaper launches meant little without enough payloads to fill them — which is what drove SpaceX to build its own satellite internet business, Starlink.
About 75% of Falcon 9 launches last year carried Starlink satellites. Starlink revenue rose from roughly $1 billion in 2022 to surpass half of total revenue by 2023, reaching an estimated $10 billion last year — leading analysts to argue SpaceX should now be viewed as a telecom company, not a rocket company. Launches themselves are close to break-even: with a Falcon 9 designed for ten reuses, revenue from four external customer launches can cover the cost of all ten, making the remaining six essentially free Starlink launches.
SpaceX's IPO prospectus disclosed three core business pillars for the first time: AI, connectivity (Starlink), and space (launch). Notably, it revealed data-center leasing deals worth $15 billion a year with Anthropic and $11 billion with Google, leasing spare capacity from its Colossus data centers run by xAI (the Grok operator, now merged into SpaceX). Factoring in a rumored Cursor acquisition and full-year revenue guidance, the price-to-sales ratio falls from roughly 100x based on last year's $18.7 billion revenue to about 30x — still well above Tesla's roughly 15x six-year average, prompting some to call the valuation rich.
The next big frontier flagged was orbital data centers — satellites equipped with solar panels and compute hardware, sidestepping ground-based power and permitting constraints, built on the same launch-and-reuse infrastructure as Starlink. A recent Google data-center leasing deal implies roughly $50 billion per gigawatt, more than triple the roughly $15 billion consensus from just months earlier, underscoring how severe the compute shortage has become. The key variable is Starship's maturation — payload capacity needs to scale from Falcon 9's 20 tons to Starship V3's 100 tons and eventually V4's 200 tons for the economics to work. SpaceX targets 2028, though panelists suggested 2029 is more realistic.
Speculation also touched on a possible Cursor merger this year followed by a Tesla merger, the logic being that Optimus and self-driving both need AI and connectivity infrastructure that would benefit from Starlink-style vertical integration. There was also talk SpaceX could acquire telecom carriers in various countries to enable direct-to-cell satellite connectivity — it already spent over 20 trillion won acquiring EchoStar's spectrum last year. Panelists flagged political backlash and regulatory risk from a single company dominating launch, telecom, data centers, and AI models, plus growing concerns over satellite congestion and anti-satellite technology.