SpaceX Spent $329M on Tesla Megapacks as AI Data Center Costs Surge

SpaceX invested $329 million in Tesla Megapack battery systems during the first half of 2026, according to a quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The spending underscores how rapidly power infrastructure costs are climbing as the company expands its AI data center footprint.

Purchases reached $295 million in the second quarter alone, up sharply from $34 million in the first three months of the year. The six-month total already represents about 65 percent of the $506 million SpaceX recorded in Megapack purchases for all of 2025, signaling a significant acceleration in battery storage investment.

The expenditure adds a new layer to the AI infrastructure equation. Beyond servers, networking, and cooling, large data centers require electrical systems capable of responding quickly when thousands of chips simultaneously raise or lower their power consumption. Battery storage helps smooth those fluctuations, providing backup power during peak demand and stabilizing electrical load swings that can strain grid connections.

SpaceX's quarterly filing records the Megapacks as property, plant, and equipment. The company acquired xAI on February 2 and now reports AI as one of its three operating segments. Research and development costs in that segment rose by $2.53 billion during the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, with $1.74 billion of the increase attributed to infrastructure and cloud computing expenses tied to data center expansion.

The figures reinforce the picture presented in SpaceX's initial public offering filing, which showed how deeply the company's financial performance had become linked to xAI's computing ambitions. The U.S. Department of Energy has described AI data centers as large, dynamic loads that can create repeated swings in electricity demand, making battery systems valuable even when facilities have access to the grid or on-site generation.

Megapacks do not produce electricity themselves; they must be charged from the grid, renewable resources, or on-site generation before releasing power back to a facility. SpaceX and xAI have been expanding those other sources as well. Elon Musk's acquisition of mobile power provider APR Energy could provide temporary or supplemental generation, while xAI has pursued gas-fired power for its Mississippi data centers.

Used together, generation and battery storage serve different parts of the same workload. Generators and grid connections supply the electricity, while batteries help manage short-term changes, peaks, and interruptions. The Tesla purchases appear in the filing's related-party transactions section because Musk leads both companies.

SpaceX did not disclose how many Megapacks it purchased, their combined storage capacity, where they are installed, or how long they could support a data center during an outage. The purchase value provides a clear measure of spending but not of system performance; capacity, discharge duration, and facility load would be needed to assess the operational resilience the batteries provide.

For companies expanding AI capacity, SpaceX's spending illustrates how quickly the power portion of a project can grow. Access to chips may determine what a data center can compute, but electricity supply, storage, and grid connections determine when that computing capacity is ready to use.