Wall Street is preparing for what could be the largest stock market debut in history. SpaceX has filed confidentially for an initial public offering with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, putting it on track for a June listing that would make it the first of a potential trio of mega-IPOs, ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic.
The offering could raise as much as $75 billion, dwarfing Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion debut in 2019, the current record holder. Internally, the deal carries an appropriately grand codename. Referred to as Project Apex within the company, the listing is expected to value the rocket company controlled by founder and CEO Elon Musk at $1.75 trillion.
SpaceX is working with at least 21 banks on the offering, one of the largest underwriting syndicates assembled in recent years. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup are serving as lead banks managing the deal, with a further 16 banks signed on in smaller roles. The breadth of the syndicate reflects not just deal complexity but market confidence in the SpaceX brand.
The IPO proceeds are intended to fund something considerably more ambitious than rocket launches. Elon Musk says the capital will underwrite an effort to turn the rocket maker into an AI powerhouse, launching up to one million data center satellites into orbit to bypass power and water constraints on Earth.
That ambition, however, draws an uncomfortable parallel. Microsoft pursued a similar escape from land-based computing limits in 2015 with Project Natick, sinking a shipping-container-sized data center onto the seabed off Scotland. It met all technical targets but was abandoned due to lack of client demand and unviable economics.
Five data center specialists told Reuters that what went wrong for Microsoft is a cautionary tale for SpaceX: both projects rely on modular units that are expensive to deploy and cannot be expanded, repaired, or upgraded, features considered critical by the AI industry. The sealed design has limited flexibility, since AI chips improve rapidly each year while a satellite may be replaced only every five to seven years.
The financial math compounds the challenge. Analysts at MoffettNathanson estimated that Musk’s plan to put a million AI satellites in space would run into the trillions of dollars. For orbital data centers to become commercially viable, launch costs would need to fall from today’s low thousands of dollars per kilogram to the low hundreds.
Industry analysts suggest space data centers are more likely to serve niche applications, including military satellite constellations and space stations, rather than replace ground-based infrastructure in any foreseeable timeframe. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put it plainly earlier this year: we should work on the ground first, because we are already here.
The world is watching Project Apex. Whether the orbital ambition justifies its price tag is the question investors will have to answer.
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