By Franco Granda
Publication Date: 2026-05-27 00:00:00
When SpaceX reported the company’s financials ahead of its expected IPO next month, there was an important omission that had nothing to do with rocket launches or satellites. Instead, this data point, deleted from an earlier version of the company’s accounting, showed how valuable a business AI infrastructure can be.
According to an earlier draft of the S-1 reviewed by PitchBook, the company’s first two Colossus II clusters were built for $2.7 million per megawatt. That’s about a four-fold improvement over the industry benchmark. Combined with the $1.25 billion per month computing contract with Anthropic (disclosed elsewhere in the filing), the economic data suggests SpaceX will recoup its AI infrastructure investment in less than a month. Even with double the disclosed costs, the payback period is 2.2 months.
Anthropic, a direct competitor to xAI-developed AI assistant Grok, will pay SpaceX $15 billion annually through May 2029 for access to its computing infrastructure. This is almost equivalent to the total turnover of…
