The Real Winner of SpaceX’s IPO: Mark Zuckerberg

Wall Street has spent months questioning Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive AI capital spending, with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) raising its 2026 capex guidance to $130 to $145 billion after a Q1 in which revenue grew 33% year over year. While investors debate whether Meta is overspending, a quieter filing from SpaceX just laid out a monetization playbook that Zuckerberg would do well to study.

In its recently disclosed S-1, SpaceX revealed that in May 2026 it signed Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic granting access to compute capacity across its COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II supercomputers. The terms are striking. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee, and either party may terminate on 90 days’ notice. SpaceX explicitly states that this structure monetizes unused compute capacity while still permitting reallocation for its own internal initiatives whenever needed.

The AWS Precedent Meta Cannot Ignore

I have held Meta since December 2022 and read every transcript Zuckerberg has put out on infrastructure. The pattern is familiar. Amazon Web Services was built originally to handle Amazon’s own retail spikes. In 2006, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) opened that excess capacity to outside developers. Two decades later, the bet has compounded into something almost without precedent in enterprise technology. AWS posted $42.2 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, running at a $169 billion annualized rate and growing 37% year over year, its fastest pace in 18 quarters. Its AI and custom-chip businesses have each crossed a $25 billion annual run rate of their own, both growing at triple-digit percentages. On the earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy put it simply: “AWS is booming.”

Hyperscale infrastructure built for internal use tends to become a generational business when its owner decides to rent the excess. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural feature of capital-intensive technology platforms, and Meta has every prerequisite in place to repeat the playbook.

Meta Has Every Ingredient Except the Decision

Look at what Meta is already building. Q1 2026 capex hit $19.8 billion, up roughly 47% year over year. Meta subsequently narrowed its full-year 2026 guidance to $130 to $145 billion, still nearly doubling 2025’s actual spend of $72.2 billion. Zuckerberg told investors that Meta is “rolling out more than one gigawatt of our own custom silicon” developed with Broadcom alongside AMD and NVIDIA systems. At the same time, Meta announced approximately 8,000 layoffs alongside the capex raise, a deliberate shift from labor to compute as the primary driver of future output.

CFO Susan Li was explicit on scale: “These multiyear cloud deals and our infrastructure purchase agreements drove a $107 billion step up in our contractual commitments this quarter.” She also acknowledged the planning uncertainty, noting that if Meta ends up not needing as much capacity as anticipated, it can choose to bring it online more slowly or reduce spending in future years. Meta is building flexibility into a fleet that will inevitably have periods of underutilization between training runs. SpaceX has now demonstrated exactly how to monetize those gaps: short-notice-terminable contracts with frontier labs that pay hyperscaler-grade economics for capacity you can reclaim whenever your own roadmap demands it.

The $100 Billion Optionality

This is a thesis on optionality, and that framing deserves to be stated clearly. If Meta sold even a fraction of its excess capacity to one large frontier customer at terms similar to SpaceX’s Anthropic arrangement, that is a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue stream at near-pure incremental margin. Layer it onto a company already producing operating margins above 40% with a market cap now approaching $1.6 trillion, and a re-rating in the neighborhood of $100 billion of additional market cap becomes a reasonable bull-case scenario.

The Azure comparison sharpens the point. For Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), commercial remaining performance obligation climbed to $678 billion in its most recent quarter (fiscal Q4 2026, ended June 30), up 84% year over year, with the OpenAI relationship accounting for a meaningful share of that backlog. Excluding OpenAI, RPO still grew 25%. A single anchor customer can reshape a platform’s entire valuation story.

The SpaceX filing tips its competitive intent clearly, stating it intends to sell excess capacity to a limited number of third parties, potentially positioning it as a competitor to CoreWeave and Nebius as well as the hyperscalers. The same filing names Meta directly as a foundational-model competitor. The race for compute customers has begun, and Meta is the lone top-tier player still on the sidelines.

The Risk Side, Honestly

Meta selling compute to Anthropic or any frontier lab would mean powering its competitors. Zuckerberg has talked openly about needing to “fully optimize the stack” for Meta’s own agents, including the company’s newly launched Meta Superintelligence Labs and its first proprietary foundation model, Muse Spark. The stock has had a volatile year, trading in a 52-week range from roughly $520 to $796, and Q2 2026 brought fresh pressure: EPS of $6.18 missed analyst expectations by a wide margin, as $2.4 billion in legal charges and $1.18 billion in severance inflated costs. Operating margin fell to 31% for the quarter.

Even so, the underlying franchise remains formidable. Meta’s family of apps reached 3.60 billion daily active people in June 2026, and advertising revenue grew 27% in Q2 to $59.4 billion. Reality Labs continues to burn capital, posting a $4.62 billion operating loss in Q2 alone, wider than the $4.03 billion recorded in Q1. Cumulative losses in that division have now reached approximately $88 billion since the segment was broken out in late 2020. A high-margin compute revenue stream would strengthen the investment case on both fronts simultaneously, providing a buffer for the ongoing hardware bet while the advertising engine compounds.

If you believe Meta’s AI investment cycle will pay off in product, you should also want management to consider every adjacent monetization path the AWS history book opens up. SpaceX just publicly priced the option at $1.25 billion per month. The operator who rents the excess capacity earliest tends to win the decade. Zuckerberg has the compute, the balance sheet, and the engineering culture to run that play. The only question is whether he wants to.

Editor’s note: AWS figures have been updated to reflect Q2 2026 results, with the annualized run rate raised to $169 billion and growth revised to 37% year over year. Microsoft’s commercial RPO has been refreshed to $678 billion, up 84% year over year, from fiscal Q4 2026. Meta’s 2026 capex guidance has been narrowed to $130 to $145 billion per the Q2 update, Meta’s market cap has been revised to approximately $1.6 trillion, Reality Labs’ Q2 2026 operating loss has been updated to $4.62 billion, cumulative Reality Labs losses have been corrected to approximately $88 billion, and the daily active people figure has been updated to 3.60 billion from Q2 2026.

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