HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Elon Musk on July 20 pushed back on a report claiming SpaceX had placed a $52 billion order for Nvidia artificial-intelligence chips, dismissing the story on X with a blunt two-word reply: "fake news."
The report originated in Taiwanese media citing unnamed industry sources, which said SpaceX planned to acquire roughly 13,000 AI server racks — equivalent to about one million Nvidia GB300 GPUs — from Foxconn, with each rack estimated near $4 million. Musk's denial was direct, but the scale of the rumor said something about how far SpaceX has come.
A Rumor That Reflects Real Momentum
Even as Musk knocked down the specific figure, the story spoke to the company's explosive growth in AI infrastructure. SpaceX already operates gigawatt-scale terrestrial clusters, including the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis with more than 220,000 GPUs, and has monetized them aggressively through leasing deals. That expansion has tracked alongside SpaceX's rising profile with public investors since it went public earlier this year.
A $52 billion commitment would have dwarfed most corporate AI budgets. Whether or not the Foxconn order is real, the rumor landed precisely because SpaceX has made compute one of its fastest-growing lines of business.
An AI Cloud Business Hitting Its Stride
SpaceX has signed cloud-computing deals with Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI, with Anthropic alone reportedly paying around $1.25 billion a month for access to more than 220,000 GPUs and Google paying roughly $920 million a month. Combined, the arrangements represent an estimated $27 billion to $28 billion in annualized revenue, a figure that increasingly rivals SpaceX's traditional launch and Starlink businesses.
Demand for $NVDA hardware sits at the heart of that build-out, and the same reusability that delivered SpaceX's 600th flight-proven booster landing helps generate the cash to fund it. Rockets pay for compute; compute funds the next generation of rockets.
Grok, Colossus and the Orbital Vision
The infrastructure also powers SpaceX's internal AI ambitions, particularly the Grok models developed under the integrated SpaceXAI division. Musk has long argued that AI scaling will eventually demand solutions beyond Earth, and SpaceX has floated plans for AI-optimized satellites cooled in space and powered by solar arrays.
As Teslarati noted, the Foxconn deal may not be in the cards, but SpaceX's trajectory of blending aerospace engineering with hyperscale AI is very much real. Even the rumors now come with eleven-figure price tags — a sign of just how large Musk's space company has become.
