SpaceX has invested more than $15 billion in developing its Starship rocket at its Starbase facility in South Texas, according to a recent US SEC filing detailing expenses as of May 2026 [1, 2, 3]. The total development cost far exceeds the original 2018 estimate by Elon Musk, who had projected spending between $2 billion and $10 billion at that time [2, 3].
In 2025 alone, SpaceX spent about $3 billion on Starship development, up from approximately $1.84 billion in 2024 [2, 3]. Starship is intended as the most powerful rocket ever built. It is designed to be fully reusable and will launch large satellites as well as crewed missions to the Moon and Mars [2, 3].
In addition to its space ambitions, SpaceX has secured a nearly $45 billion, three-year contract to provide large-scale AI computing services to Anthropic, a leading AI company that builds the Claude AI model [2, 4, 5]. The agreement runs through May 2029 with average monthly payments to SpaceX estimated at roughly $12.5 billion, although payments are lower during the ramp-up period of May to June 2026 [2, 4, 5].
Anthropic currently operates its AI workloads on SpaceX's Memphis-based Colossus 1 data center, which has over 300MW of computing capacity. The companies have expanded the partnership to include a second SpaceX data center, according to Anthropic co-founder and chief computing officer Thomas Browne, who said the partnership "expanded to a second SpaceX data center's compute power" [2].
SpaceX is also negotiating to provide AI cloud services to other customers beyond Anthropic. Elon Musk said, "SpaceX is talking to other companies about AI computing services. As orbital data centers come online, we expect to offer AI compute at extremely large scale" [2, 5].
The company has partnered with Dell Technologies to build AI servers, supporting Taiwanese original design manufacturers including Hon Hai (Foxconn), Quanta, Wistron, and Compal [4, 5]. Wistron has long supplied Dell AI servers, while Compal recently opened a new Texas plant targeting production of Dell's L10 AI server model starting in Q2 2026 [4, 5].
SpaceX plans to go public on June 12, 2026, with an estimated valuation of about $1.75 trillion, marking a key milestone for both its space and AI businesses [3, 4, 5].
