SpaceX Has Already Lost AI Race

Someone, please tell me if I’m wrong. SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) said its capital expenditures were $18.4 billion in the quarter that just ended. Almost all of the spending is going toward AI. By the same token, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) says it will spend a ton more. Yahoo reports, “Oracle expects capital expenditures of up to $95 billion in fiscal 2027, though it expects repayments from customers for up ‌to $25 billion of that.” And that number is small by megatech company standards.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) says capex in the current fiscal year will be $175 billion. In the current quarter, it will be $50 billion. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) says it will be $220 billion this year, which is a revision upward from the number it gave three months ago. Meta (NASDAQ: META) has put it as high as $145 billion for the year. Total across these large companies, and a few which are slightly smaller, the sum for 2026 is $860 billion, up 80% year over year.

I don’t understand it. The market hammered SpaceX, in part because of the AI spending plan. But they are tiny.

It’s harder to figure out why SpaceX rents out data center capacity. Why doesn’t it use it for its own AI buildout? CNBC reports, “While SpaceX’s own models are seen as behind OpenAI and Anthropic, the company is positioning itself as an alternative cloud player by renting out the computing capacity that it is building with Nvidia chips.” Some of that appears to involve providing service to Google and Anthropic.

Here’s another thing that’s hard to understand. When it comes to enterprise software spending, OpenAI, Anthropic, and to a lesser extent companies like Microsoft and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) show up. Where is SpaceX?

Jump way across the AI industry to AI assistants? xAI’s Grok lags well behind leaders in Apple’s App Store. Those leaders include Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.

Something is missing. If xAI’s capex spending is at the low end among the industry’s leaders, its enterprise adoption is low, and its consumer market share is low, what’s going on?

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