SpaceX Has Spent $329 Million on Tesla Batteries This Year. Here's Why.
The rocket company is buying industrial-scale battery storage at a pace that shows just how tightly Elon Musk's businesses are wired together, and what that means for the AI data centers powering it all.
Key points
- SpaceX spent $295 million on Tesla Megapacks, large industrial battery storage units, in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
- SpaceX's total Tesla Megapack purchases reached $329 million in the first half of 2026.
- Before SpaceX acquired xAI, the AI company had already bought $430 million worth of Megapacks for its own data centers.
- As of December 2025, SpaceX had also purchased $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks at the manufacturer's suggested retail price.
SpaceX bought $329 million worth of Tesla Megapacks, the large industrial battery units Tesla sells to businesses and utilities, in just the first six months of 2026, according to the company's earnings report released Tuesday. That's not a typo. That's the price of a small office tower, spent on batteries.
The figure, first reported by TechCrunch AI, puts a dollar number on something most people hadn't fully clocked: Elon Musk's companies are deeply, financially intertwined.
Who is paying whom, exactly?
SpaceX is buying from Tesla. Musk runs both. He also owns xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind the Grok chatbot, which SpaceX acquired earlier this year. Before that merger, xAI had already bought $430 million in Megapacks on its own.
So the money is moving in a tight circle. Tesla makes the batteries. xAI's data centres need the batteries. SpaceX now owns xAI. And SpaceX writes the cheques to Tesla.
There's also a Cybertruck line in the filing: as of December 2025, SpaceX had bought $131 million worth of Tesla's electric pickup trucks at the standard retail price.
Why do AI data centres need so many batteries?
This is the part that surprises most people. AI data centres don't draw electricity at a steady, predictable rate. Training a large language model, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok, can cause the power draw to spike sharply, then fall back just as fast.
Those spikes are expensive. Utilities often charge extra for peak demand, and on-site gas generators can struggle to respond fast enough.
Batteries fix both problems. A Megapack can kick in within a second, smoothing out the spikes before the utility even notices. That keeps the bills lower and the servers running without interruption.
xAI has leaned on natural gas turbines to power its data centres, including some that operated without proper permits at a site in Mississippi near its Colossus supercomputer project. But batteries remain essential even in gas-heavy setups, because they handle the short, sharp demand peaks that turbines can't match.
| Purchase | Amount | Period |
|---|---|---|
| SpaceX Megapack spend (H1 2026) | $329 million | Jan to Jun 2026 |
| SpaceX Megapack spend (Q2 2026) | $295 million | Apr to Jun 2026 |
| xAI Megapack spend (pre-merger) | $430 million | Before 2026 |
| SpaceX Megapack spend (Q1 2026) | $34 million | Jan to Mar 2026 |
| SpaceX Cybertruck purchases | $131 million | As of Dec 2025 |
What does this mean for ordinary people?
Nothing immediate for your electricity bill or your phone. But if you work in energy storage, property near data centres, or anything touching Musk's constellation of companies, the scale of this spending is worth understanding.
For everyone else, the honest takeaway is this: the AI boom is a physical infrastructure boom. It runs on chips, power, and batteries. The companies building it are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware most people have never heard of. That money has to come from somewhere, and right now it's coming fast.
One doable takeaway: If you want to understand where AI investment is actually flowing, follow the hardware contracts, not just the chatbot headlines. The battery and chip supply chains are where the real money is moving.
