SpaceX has bought $329M worth of Tesla Megapacks so far this year

SpaceX's latest earnings report drops a number that says a lot about how Elon Musk runs his empire: $295 million spent on Tesla Megapacks in the second quarter alone, bringing the 2026 total to $329 million. That money isn't going toward rockets. It's going toward battery storage for xAI's data centers, the AI venture SpaceX absorbed earlier this year after xAI had already swallowed X.

The deal history reads like a corporate ouroboros. xAI bought $430 million in Megapacks before the merger with SpaceX went through, and its purchases jumped from a modest $34 million in the first quarter to a much heavier spend once SpaceX took the reins. Musk sits atop all three companies as either CEO or largest shareholder, which means these transactions are less arm's-length deals and more like moving cash between pockets of the same jacket. SpaceX also disclosed $131 million in Cybertruck purchases at MSRP through December, another data point in the same pattern.

Why batteries, and why so many? AI data centers don't sip power steadily, they gulp it in bursts. Training runs and inference spikes create sudden demand that can either trigger steep utility penalties or strain on-site generators past their limits. Megapacks act as a buffer, discharging in under a second to cover those peaks and keeping GPUs fed without forcing the whole site to over-provision generation capacity it rarely needs.

That need for buffering matters more given how xAI has been generating its baseline power. The company has leaned hard on natural gas, including dozens of turbines running without permits near its Colossus site in Mississippi. Batteries don't solve the permitting problem, but they do reduce how much gas-fired capacity has to sit idle waiting for demand spikes, which is presumably part of the financial logic behind writing a nine-figure check to a sister company for grid-scale batteries.