Key Takeaways
- SpaceX stock bounced 6% on Friday after a selloff that followed the midterms, as investors worried about a freeze on new US data centers.
- On the All-In podcast, Chamath Palihapitiya argued that the freeze favors companies that already own compute capacity. He said SpaceX’s revenue from Anthropic could rise 2 to 3x.
- Anthropic’s S-1 puts its SpaceX deals at up to $120.5 billion, or about $37 billion a year once all the capacity is delivered. Either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice after the first periods end in early 2027.
- The freeze looks like a net win for SpaceX’s pricing over the next year, but its 2027 growth still depends on building new US sites, including in Texas.
Democrats won both the House and the Senate last week, and investors read that as bad news for SpaceX (SPCX). A freeze on new US data centers looks like a threat to the compute business that now brings in about half of SpaceX’s revenue.
The stock slid for two days after the election, then bounced 6% on Friday.
Chamath Palihapitiya thinks the freeze helps SpaceX.
On this weekend’s episode of All-In, he argued that a slowdown helps whoever already owns capacity, and he counted SpaceX among the hyperscalers that do. He said it’s bad news for the AI labs, since “they are so short this capacity and they needed to grow.”
Then he got to Anthropic. Either side can end their compute deal on 90 days’ notice. If SpaceX did that, Chamath said, it could reprice the compute at the spot rate, “which is probably double.” In his telling, SpaceX’s revenue from Anthropic “could 2 to 3x,” and Anthropic “would have no choice except to immediately capitulate and take the higher price.”
Talk about leverage.
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Anthropic’s bill is already huge
Anthropic’s S-1 puts its SpaceX deals at up to $120.5 billion over terms running into 2029. That’s about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity is delivered, which Anthropic expects in December. The first periods of the deals end in January and March 2027, and after that either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice.
So call it $37 billion a year at full speed. Double that and you get about $74 billion. Triple it and it’s about $112 billion.
That’s a big number even for SpaceX. Analysts expect its total revenue to jump from $48.9 billion this year to $180 billion in 2027. At today’s rates, Anthropic alone would be about a fifth of next year’s revenue:
Those estimates assume SpaceX keeps adding compute at a furious pace, and a freeze on new US sites could slow that down. Higher prices from Anthropic would come on top of them.
SpaceX doesn’t have to rip anything up
In Chamath’s scenario, Musk uses the 90-day exit as a weapon. But SpaceX is already getting paid more for scarce compute without it. Its Super Intelligence segment, where the compute rentals sit, brought in $7.56 billion of revenue in the third quarter, up from $2.56 billion in the second, mostly on its cloud deals. And Musk has said on SpaceX’s earnings calls that renewals are coming in “at higher dollars per watt.”
Walking away from Anthropic would be a riskier way to get paid. Anthropic can use the same exit, and its S-1 lists big compute commitments to several other suppliers.
SpaceX needs Texas too
SpaceX can only charge for compute it actually builds, and it’s building a lot. Its capital spending nearly tripled from a year earlier, to $19.6 billion in the third quarter:
Management expects $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter alone.
The trouble is where that money goes. Gina Hinojosa won the Texas governor’s race on a promise of an immediate moratorium on data centers. According to Wells Fargo, 27% of the gigawatts of US data centers in the works are planned for Texas, where SpaceX has projects. (Republicans look set to keep the state Senate, so a moratorium would still need lawmakers to approve it.)
Even SpaceX’s biggest bulls are counting on more building on the ground. Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire replied “Fully agree” to a post calling SpaceX “the biggest beneficiary of this round of tighter regulation on ground-based data centers.” The post’s reason was space. But his own model assumes politicians let SpaceX operate with only about a 20% slowdown from the last two years. Today, SpaceX can reprice what it already runs: about 2.2 gigawatts at the end of October.
Higher prices on the compute it already has
Here’s where I land: the freeze helps SpaceX more than it hurts over the next year. Every watt it already runs gets more valuable as other projects stall, and SpaceX doesn’t need a showdown to cash in on that. I’d treat Chamath’s 2 to 3x as the best case, since it means Musk walking away from a customer worth about $37 billion a year at full capacity.
The risk is the build. If Texas passes a moratorium, SpaceX’s 2027 growth will depend far more on price than on new gigawatts. Fourth-quarter results early next year will show how close December revenue came to management’s $100 billion run-rate goal. And the first window to exit the Anthropic deals opens in January.
So what is SpaceX stock actually worth?
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