SpaceX has bought $329M worth of Tesla Megapacks so far this year
TechCrunch Tim De Chant ● Covered by 5 sources
SpaceX spent $329M on Tesla Megapack batteries so far this year, per its earnings report. It's another sign of how tangled Musk's companies have become—these batteries are likely powering xAI's data centers.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Tim De Chant — read the original for the full story.
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SpaceX's latest earnings report drops a number that says a lot about how Elon Musk runs his businesses: $295 million spent on Tesla Megapack battery storage in the second quarter alone, bringing the year's total to $329 million. That's a steep jump from the $34 million xAI spent on the same equipment back in the first quarter, before SpaceX absorbed the AI company earlier this year.
The purchases aren't happening in a vacuum. Musk sits atop both SpaceX and Tesla, and his AI venture xAI—which picked up his social platform X in 2025—now lives inside SpaceX after this year's merger. So when SpaceX writes a check to Tesla for industrial batteries, it's really one arm of the Musk empire paying another, with the equipment almost certainly headed to xAI's data centers. Before the merger, xAI had already put down $430 million on Megapacks on its own.
The batteries matter because AI data centers don't sip power steadily—they gulp it in bursts. Training runs and inference spikes push demand up and down unpredictably, and those swings can trigger steep utility charges or strain on-site generators. Megapacks act as a buffer, discharging power in a second or less when GPUs need a jolt and smoothing out the peaks that would otherwise blow up the electricity bill.
It's a notable complement to xAI's other power strategy, which has leaned hard on natural gas, including a stack of unpermitted turbines running near the Colossus data center site in Mississippi. Batteries clearly aren't replacing that gas dependency, but they're becoming a bigger piece of the puzzle. SpaceX's filing also mentioned $131 million in Tesla Cybertruck purchases at MSRP through December, another data point in just how much money moves between Musk's ventures.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Nobody should be shocked that Musk's companies are basically one big internal economy at this point—SpaceX buying batteries from Tesla to power a data center for an AI company SpaceX itself now owns is about as circular as it gets. The real story is that even with all this in-house hardware, xAI still needs unpermitted gas turbines to keep the lights on, which says more about the actual scale of AI power demand than any earnings-report line item does.
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