SpaceX's Google Cloud Windfall Arrives as Lock-Up Expiry Tests Investor Nerve
Published on 08/06/2026 at 12:03 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The timing could hardly be more awkward — or more welcome. Just as SpaceX braces for the largest unlock of insider shares since its market debut, the company has unveiled a roughly $30 billion infrastructure pact with Google Cloud that hands investors a tangible counterweight to the selling pressure building around the stock.
Under the terms of the agreement, SpaceX will lease 110,000 Nvidia graphics processors for $920 million per month, running from October 2026 through June 2029. The computing muscle is earmarked for Google's Gemini AI model, among other workloads. Google Cloud simultaneously sealed partnerships with IBM and Palantir, pushing its order backlog to $460 billion.
The Google deal extends a pattern of blockbuster compute agreements for SpaceX. The company previously signed a $1.25 billion-per-month contract with Anthropic for a Memphis data center. What makes the Google relationship particularly notable is the search giant's existing stake in SpaceX — roughly 5 percent — which some reports suggest could swell to a valuation as high as $100 billion as the two companies deepen their ties.
Nvidia's central role
The cloud contract builds on the exclusive Nvidia partnership that chief executive Elon Musk touted on the company's first post-IPO earnings call. That arrangement covers the upcoming Vera Rubin chip generation, destined for both data centers and the planned Starmind satellite constellation. Markets reacted divergently to the news: Nvidia shares climbed 3.7 percent while rival AMD slid 6 percent.
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The combination of large-scale cloud orders and chip alliances underscores how aggressively SpaceX is now pushing its AI business. The segment nearly tripled revenue to $2.56 billion in the second quarter, though it remained deeply loss-making on an operating basis, posting a $1.26 billion deficit.
A bruising earnings debut
The fresh contract wins do little to alter the strained backdrop from which SpaceX is currently trading. Last Tuesday marked the company's first quarterly report as a listed entity: revenue jumped 92 percent to $7.8 billion, beating consensus estimates handily, while the net loss narrowed to $541 million from roughly $1 billion a year earlier. Starlink emerged as the profit engine — the division generated $1.66 billion in operating income on $4.29 billion in revenue, with subscribers doubling to 12 million.
Yet the market's attention fixed on the spending side of the ledger. Capital expenditures surged to $18.4 billion in the quarter — six times the prior-year level — with roughly $15.8 billion of that funneled into AI infrastructure. Musk reiterated his ambition of reaching $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, pulling the target forward from his earlier 2031 projection. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen assured analysts the AI investments would pay for themselves in under a year, while flagging similar expenditure levels for the next two quarters.
Investors were not mollified. The stock has shed roughly 12.5 percent since the report, closing Wednesday at €93.46 after a 14.12 percent drop. The shares now sit just 2.66 percent above their 52-week low, set on August 3, and remain more than 50 percent below June's record high. On a monthly basis, the decline stands at 28.65 percent.
The lock-up wave arrives
Today's expiry of the first post-IPO lock-up adds a fresh layer of pressure. Approximately 911.5 million shares — over 20 percent of insider-held stock — become tradable, more than doubling the free float from 4.9 percent to 11.8 percent. Because the share price never reached the $175.50 threshold required for early release, an additional 455.8 million shares remain locked for now. Musk's own 42 percent stake, equivalent to 6.4 billion shares, stays blocked until June 2027. Roughly 12.9 billion further shares are slated for release by mid-2027, making today's event merely the opening wave of a prolonged supply overhang.
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Wall Street splits on valuation
The analyst community has responded with sharply divergent views. Wells Fargo's Ken Gawrelski trimmed his price target from $230 to $215 while maintaining a Buy rating, citing an elevated capex estimate of $296 billion for 2027 — $263 billion of which would go to AI. JPMorgan, by contrast, raised its target to $240, keeping it among the more bullish calls. Piper Sandler cut its price objective dramatically to $140 and downgraded the stock to Neutral, pointing to the doubling of the float, a $17 billion increase in its 2027 capex estimate, and cancellable AI contracts as key risks.
A stabilizing sign
In German trading Thursday, the shares were changing hands at €95.18, up 1.84 percent — a modest recovery that keeps the stock just above its 52-week low of €91.04, set only days ago. The uptick suggests that substantive commercial news is beginning to offer some support after the turbulent post-earnings session.
Whether early backers — Founders Fund, Craft Ventures, Valor Equity, Alphabet among them — choose to cash out or hold remains the open question. The coming sessions will reveal whether the Google Cloud deal can offset the gravitational pull of a historic share unlock.
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