SpaceX’s highly anticipated market debut has quickly become a benchmark for the next wave of AI-related listings. The company closed its first day of trading up 19% at about $161 per share, after pricing at $135, pushing its valuation above $2 trillion by the end of the session.
The offering, valued at $1.77 trillion at the IPO price, was the largest public market debut on record. Its strong reception has drawn attention not only because of SpaceX’s core launch and satellite businesses, but also because of the company’s growing links to artificial intelligence through Elon Musk’s broader startup portfolio.
SpaceX is best known for Starlink, its low-Earth-orbit satellite internet business. That unit is central to the company’s financial profile and, according to the source material, carries a 39% operating margin. That profitability matters because it can offset the costs of more speculative efforts, including AI ambitions tied to Musk’s xAI, which SpaceX acquired in a deal valued at $250 billion. xAI includes the Grok chatbot and a large-scale AI training facility called Colossus.
The IPO has landed just as investors are watching two other closely held AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, which have both filed confidentially for public offerings. The question now is whether SpaceX’s debut will influence how markets value AI companies that have not yet proven they can match the profitability of a business like Starlink.
Analysts caution that the comparison may be limited. SpaceX has a profitable communications business that can cushion bets on less certain technologies. OpenAI and Anthropic, by contrast, are still spending heavily to attract users and build products, and the source material says they are losing money. Their free offerings help drive adoption, but they also add to the strain on already expensive computing resources.
Those costs are part of a broader challenge facing AI firms. Data center capacity remains constrained, which raises the price of both training and running large models. The source material notes that, in response, both OpenAI and Anthropic are considering major price reductions for tokens in order to gain more customers, even as operating costs continue to rise.
SpaceX’s AI story also depends on a more speculative promise. Its acquisition of xAI was tied in part to plans for orbital data centers, an idea meant to sidestep limits on Earth-based infrastructure. The company’s ability to build such systems could become a major factor in how investors value the AI side of its business.
Morningstar, in a research note cited by the source, argued that SpaceX would be worth far less without its more ambitious future projects. The firm said the elevated valuation rests on two unproven ideas. One is a rapidly reusable Starship upper stage. The other is commercially viable orbital AI data centers. Morningstar said it does not expect either question to be answered before 2028, even under an optimistic timeline.
The firm also outlined a high-end scenario in which orbital data centers could capture 20% of projected AI computing capacity by 2040. In that case, it said SpaceX could support a share price of $154, but it placed only a 7% probability on that outcome.
For now, SpaceX’s debut has set a high bar for public-market enthusiasm. Anthropic and OpenAI are currently valued at $965 billion and $852 billion, respectively. Combined with SpaceX’s valuation, those figures point to a level of investor demand that would exceed what the entire U.S. IPO market raised in 2025, keeping debate over an AI bubble firmly in view.