SpaceX Stock Rises Again. AI Demand Isn't Slowing Down. -- Barrons.com

By Al Root

AI demand just isn't slowing down, and SpaceX stock was up again Thursday.

Shares of Elon Musk's rocket and AI company rose 2.6% on Thursday to $154.81, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.1% and 0.6%, respectively.

The rise followed a 5.2% jump on Wednesday. SpaceX scheduled the 14th test flight for its huge, fully reusable rocket, Starship, which might have helped. The initial date was Sept. 22. The flight is now scheduled for Sept. 28, according to the company's website.

Reports that SK Hynix was in talks with Intel to make memory chips in the U.S. might have given SpaceX stock a boost, too. "The discussions could represent another step toward expanding Intel's partnership with SpaceX," wrote Citi analyst Atif Malik on Wednesday. "With SK Hynix/Intel potentially providing the US-based memory manufacturing capability that complements Intel's 14A and advanced packaging offerings."

SpaceX is building a chip-making facility with Tesla in Austin, Texas, believing that semiconductor availability will eventually become a bottleneck to AI growth.

Growth has surprised to the upside. SpaceX is expected to generate 2027 AI revenue of about $67 billion. In June, that estimate was $38 billion. What's more, Wall Street expects SpaceX to generate 2030 AI revenue of about $275 billion. In June, that estimate was about $110 billion.

At the end of the second quarter, hyperscaler backlog, which is a proxy for AI demand, was roughly $2.5 trillion, up about 100% year over year, and up from less than $500 billion in late 2022, before ChatGPT was released, according to Daniel Sorid, head of Citi's U.S. investment grade credit strategy.

Second-quarter cloud revenue topped $100 billion for the first time. Capital spending on data centers also topped $100 billion for the first time.

Of course, growing AI demand is good for SpaceX. It ended the second quarter with 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute. (Compute is often measured by the amount of electricity needed to keep it running.) SpaceX hopes to have up to 10 gigawatts of compute running by the end of 2027.

Figuring out exactly what is moving SpaceX stock can be difficult. Shares have been volatile since the June IPO, trading as high as $225.64 and as low as $104.83 in its first few weeks as a publicly traded firm.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@barrons.com.

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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September 17, 2026 16:28 ET (20:28 GMT)