Key Takeaways
- SpaceX rose 5% today after Stifel argued it could buy stalled data center sites that already have power.
- Permitting fights after the midterms should hurt developers awaiting approvals more than SpaceX.
- Applied Digital’s CEO makes the same case, but most of its leased capacity still has to be built.
- Starship Flight 15 on Nov. 13 is the next test of Stifel’s orbital-compute case.
SpaceX (SPCX) is up 5% today after Stifel analyst Jonathan Siegmann argued the data center backlash after the Democrats’ midterm sweep could work in its favor. With an investment-grade balance sheet and $40 billion of committed GPU financing, he wrote, SpaceX is “positioned as buyer of last resort for sites that already have power.” He kept his Buy rating and $190 price target.
He’s not alone. Applied Digital (APLD) CEO Wes Cummins made the same case for his campuses in the company’s Oct. 7 earnings release: “we view every new restriction elsewhere as making what we already own harder to replicate.”
Permits are the new bottleneck
Siegmann expects the friction to hit projects planned for 2028, rather than sites already under construction. Texas is the flashpoint: Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on a moratorium on new data centers, and Wells Fargo puts 27% of planned US data center gigawatts in the state. SpaceX already had about 2.2 gigawatts of compute running at the end of October. And Siegmann thinks the backlash helps its longer-term pitch, too: “every terrestrial moratorium strengthens the case for compute in orbit.”
Applied Digital, though, still has most of its build ahead of it. Its leases cover 1.41 GW, worth about $36 billion over their base terms, but only 250 MW was live at the start of October. Applied Digital’s next report, due in January, should show whether scarcer powered sites let it charge more on new leases.
TIKR tracks 40 analysts on SpaceX. How many say “Buy”?
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A freeze would hit the big years
Analysts expect SpaceX’s revenue to climb from $48.9 billion this year to $335 billion in 2028.
Projects planned for 2028 feed the year analysts expect the most from, which is why sites that already have power matter so much to SpaceX.
Of course, buying them adds to a buildout that already eats cash: analysts expect SpaceX’s free cash flow to run negative $140.7 billion in 2027.
Still, I think Stifel has this right: a freeze hurts developers waiting on approvals far more than a company with capacity running and the balance sheet to buy what’s stuck. The next test is Flight 15 on Nov. 13, which Siegmann calls a key milestone for orbital compute, the half of his case that’s furthest from proven.
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