Markets & Business
SpaceX has bought $329M in Tesla Megapacks so far this year
SpaceX spent $295 million on Tesla Megapack battery storage in the second quarter and $329 million so far this year, according to its earnings report.
SpaceX has ramped up purchases of Tesla’s Megapack battery storage devices, spending $295 million on them in the second quarter and $329 million so far this year, the company’s earnings report released Tuesday shows. The purchases illustrate how interconnected Elon Musk’s group of companies has become: Musk is CEO and largest shareholder of both SpaceX and Tesla, his AI business xAI acquired his social media platform X in 2025, and SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year.
The industrial-scale batteries are likely being deployed at SpaceX’s xAI data centers. Before its merger with SpaceX, xAI had bought $430 million worth of Megapacks for its data centers; in the first quarter of this year, xAI had purchased only $34 million worth of the equipment. SpaceX also reported that, as of December 2025, it had acquired $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks at manufacturer’s suggested retail price, according to its regulatory filing.
Though xAI has leaned heavily on natural gas to power its data centers — including dozens of unpermitted turbines at a site in Mississippi near the Colossus data center project — large batteries like the Megapack remain a critical part of data center operations. In addition to providing backup power that can be tapped in a second or less, batteries can supply extra power to GPUs when demand spikes. AI data centers don’t draw power consistently; their demand ramps up and down depending on whether they are training models or running inference. Such peaks can trigger significant charges from a local utility or overwhelm on-site generators, and batteries help smooth them out, lowering costs while keeping the data center running consistently.
Why it matters
SpaceX’s ramp-up in Megapack purchases shows how the batteries have become a load-bearing piece of AI infrastructure economics, not just a backup system — and underscores how Musk’s companies increasingly trade capital and hardware among themselves as their businesses converge around AI compute.