SpaceX’s long-awaited IPO filing has laid bare the financial and regulatory challenges facing Elon Musk’s AI division xAI, which lost $6.4 billion from operations on $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025 — a widening gap from its $1.56 billion loss on $2.62 billion in revenue the year before. Capital expenditure is accelerating sharply, reaching $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, implying an annualised run rate exceeding $30 billion.
The filing also disclosed plans to spend a further $2.8 billion on gas turbines over three years to power its Memphis data centre infrastructure — including $2 billion specifically for the mobile gas turbines at the centre of an NAACP lawsuit. The civil rights organisation sued xAI for operating up to 46 unpermitted turbines in one of the most polluted regions in the United States, with the EPA ruling earlier this year that the company was in violation of federal law. xAI has so far received permits for only fifteen turbines.
Despite the losses, SpaceX outlined an ambitious AI roadmap, with its next-generation Grok model targeting multiple trillions of parameters — described in the filing as a step change in reasoning and intelligence. Grok currently attracts 117 million monthly active users, roughly one-fifth of the combined xAI and X platform audience of 550 million.
The filing sets 2028 as the earliest date for deploying orbital AI compute satellites, which Musk has positioned as a cheaper long-term alternative to terrestrial data centres. SpaceX, which absorbed xAI and X ahead of the listing, is targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion — potentially one of the largest public offerings in history.
