Elon Musk celebrated a new partnership between SpaceX and NVIDIA on Monday, confirming plans to launch an optimized Vera Rubin system into orbit as early as 2027.
Despite his enthusiasm, both companies’ stocks fell on the day of the announcement.
NVIDIA announced that SpaceXAI will deploy its new Vera CPU to power the next generation of agentic AI workloads, extending the chipmaker’s architecture from Earth-based data centers into orbital computing infrastructure. Musk responded directly on X.
SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028 https://t.co/qdDq8YBkzl
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2026
He described Vera as the first CPU built for agents, saying it would accelerate the orchestration, code execution, and data processing that keep SpaceX’s AI agents acting fast.
“Our design is significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack,” Musk said on X.
Vera itself packs 88 NVIDIA-designed Olympus cores and up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, claiming task completion times up to 1.8 times faster than comparable x86 processors.
SpaceXAI will pair the chip with NVIDIA’s broader Vera Rubin platform to scale infrastructure behind Grok toward gigawatt-level computing capacity.
NVIDIA shares fell 2.91% to $208.48, extending a rough week that left the stock down 5.95% over five sessions, according to TradingView data. The pullback comes just two days ahead of NVIDIA’s next earnings report, scheduled for August 26.
SpaceX stock declined as well. Shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp, trading under the ticker SPCX since its June IPO, closed down 1.44% to $135, then slipped a further 0.22% in after-hours trading to $134.70.
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The joint decline suggests Musk’s endorsement was not enough to offset broader pressure on both names.
NVIDIA trades near its 52-week range amid ongoing concerns over memory costs and export uncertainty in China, while SpaceX shares remain well below their $135 IPO price and June peak of $225.64, still recovering from an all-time low of $104.83 hit on August 3.
Neither move appears large enough to be attributed directly to the Vera partnership alone, suggesting that NVIDIA’s upcoming earnings and SpaceX’s ongoing post-IPO volatility carried more weight with investors than Monday’s announcement or Musk’s public praise.