SpaceX bought $329 million worth of Tesla Megapacks this year. That is not a typo. They dropped $295 million in just the second quarter alone. The numbers are in their earnings report. Released Tuesday. The buying spree highlights the tight knot tying Elon Musk’s empire together.
CEO of SpaceX. CEO of Tesla. The connections are obvious. But it goes deeper. Musk’s AI company, xAI, bought his social platform, X, in 20 power. Earlier this year, SpaceX swallowed xAI. Now, SpaceX is buying the batteries.
Why Megapacks?
The industrial batteries likely power xAI’s data centers. Before the merger, xAI had already bought $430 million in Megapacks. That was for their servers. In the first quarter? Just $34 million. The jump is sudden. SpaceX’s filing also notes a strange line item. By December 2025, they held $131 million in Tesla Cybertrucks at MSRP. Yes, trucks.
But the real story is energy.
xAI leans heavily on natural gas. Dozens of unpermitted turbines sit in Mississippi. Near the Colossus data center. The turbines are controversial. They bypassed permits. But gas isn’t the only solution. Large batteries are critical here. Not just for backup. For peak shaving.
AI workloads don’t run at a steady state.
They spike. When you train a model or run inference, power demand surges. Then it drops. Utilities charge heavily for those spikes. On-site generators might struggle to catch up. Batteries bridge the gap. They absorb the surge. They smooth the curve. Costs go down. Stability goes up.
“Batteries help smooth out those peaks, lowering cost while ensuring that the data center can operate consistenly.”
This is how you handle the erratic nature of artificial intelligence. You don’t build bigger generators. You build bigger buffers. Megapacks provide backup power in under a second. That speed matters. It keeps the GPUs running when the grid hiccups or when the demand spikes.
So, SpaceX buys batteries. xAI needs them. The grid can’t handle the volatility. It makes sense in the context of Musk’s integrated ecosystem. He controls the rockets. The cars. The AI. And now, the energy storage for the AI.
Is there a limit to this vertical integration?
The report mentions $329 million spent. But the infrastructure is vast. The data centers are growing. The power needs are not static. If the trend holds, the next earnings report might show an even larger number. Or maybe they stop. Or maybe they buy more Cybertrucks. Who knows? The machines just keep running. And buying.
