SpaceX Invests 3X More on AI Than Rockets and Lost $6.3 Billion on the Segment Last Year. Should Investors Be Worried?

SpaceX's planned initial public offering (IPO) on June 12 is one of the most anticipated public debuts in years. Many savvy investors are trying to figure out where the company could be headed during the next few years, using information from the company's recent S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) chief executive officer and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has touted his company's focus on sending humans to Mars and its intentions to "transform the rocket launch industry into airline-like operations."

Yet SpaceX spends at least three times more on artificial intelligence (AI) than it does on its rockets segment. Not only that, its losses from AI are much bigger than the losses from its rocket business.

With the SpaceX IPO rapidly approaching, should potential investors be concerned about the company's enormous AI capital expenditures (capex) and losses? Let's take a look.

Image source: Getty Images.

SpaceX has moonshots that don't involve the moon or Mars

If you've followed Elon Musk for any amount of time, it's probably not that surprising to find out that his rocket company is making big bets in AI. Musk's xAI company merged with SpaceX in February.

Musk often combines companies he owns and their adjacent technologies with his other companies. He once started an energy company, SolarCity, that was eventually acquired by Tesla. And last year, xAI acquired Musk's X social media company (formerly Twitter).

There's already plenty of speculation that SpaceX and Tesla could merge as soon as next year, as Tesla begins to focus its attention on autonomous systems and humanoid robotics.

Here's a quick look at SpaceX's capex spending for its three main segments, as well as its profits and operating losses for each:

Data source: SpaceX S-1 Filing.

As I mentioned earlier, SpaceX invested more than three times as much in AI as it did in its space program last year, and its artificial intelligence operating loss of $6.3 billion far outpaced its $657 million loss from its space segment.

Where's all that AI money going?

Much of the AI spending is going toward building the company's Colossus and Colossus II data centers, which are used to train SpaceX's next-generation frontier models, including Grok 5.

There are two big problems with AI data centers: They consume vast amounts of energy, and there's increasing backlash from citizens about where they're built. SpaceX believes it can eventually solve both of those problems by building data centers in space.

This would entail large satellite constellations linked together, which are equipped with AI processing capabilities to act as orbital data centers. SpaceX said in the filing: "The logical path forward is to move power-intensive AI workloads into orbit, where solar energy is near-constant and uninterrupted."

Will all of SpaceX's AI spending pay off?

This is the big question for SpaceX and its future shareholders. The company readily admits that its AI costs are rising and are likely to continue to do so. Spending on artificial intelligence already reached $7.7 billion in first-quarter 2026.

Some of the costs are being offset by new revenue, including a recent cloud services agreement with Anthropic that gives the AI company access to Colossus data centers for $1.2 billion per month through mid-2029.

But SpaceX views this investment as a smart bet because it estimates its AI total addressable market (TAM) -- including enterprise applications, AI infrastructure, consumer subscriptions, and advertising -- to be $26.5 trillion.

Whether SpaceX's AI market share is truly that large, and whether the company can capture a sizable portion of it, remains to be seen. Alphabet and Amazon have said that data centers in space are a feasible idea, though Amazon founder Jeff Bezos thinks timelines of just a few years "are probably a little ambitious."

So, yes, orbital data centers could be a thing in the future. It follows, then, that developing AI systems now could help the company stay ahead in that race.

But it's still a lot of money to spend, and it risks sidetracking SpaceX from some of its other ambitions focused on space exploration. When the company goes public, potential investors will have to decide if they're willing to take on those large risks as the company ramps up AI spending.

The amount of worry investors should have is probably proportional to the amount of risk they're willing to take on. SpaceX's bets certainly aren't for the faint of heart.

Chris Neiger has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.