SpaceX has officially signed its third massive compute deal, providing compute capacity at its Colossus data center in Southaven, Tennessee. Reflection AI will gain immediate access to NVIDIA GB300 chips at SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center. In return, Reflection will pay SpaceX $150 million per month starting July 1, with total payments reaching approximately $6.3 billion if the contract runs through its duration until 2029. Either party can terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice after the initial three-month period.

This latest partnership highlights SpaceX's strategy of commercializing its massive Colossus supercomputing infrastructure, originally developed to power Elon Musk's Grok AI models. The company has rapidly expanded its customer base in the AI sector following its February 2026 merger with xAI, a transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.

SpaceX has previously signed significant compute deals with other major players. The company granted Anthropic exclusive access to the full capacity of its Colossus 1 data center, which exceeds 300 megawatts and includes over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. According to SpaceX's IPO filings, Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, potentially generating around $45 billion over the term of the deal. Additionally, Google agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million per month for compute capacity from October 2026 through June 2029. This 32-month period will provide Google access to roughly 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, along with supporting processors and memory. SpaceX also established arrangements for computing power with Cursor, an AI coding startup that SpaceX acquired in a $60 billion all-stock deal.

These arrangements position SpaceX as an AI infrastructure powerhouse with high-margin revenue potential. The Google deal alone could generate nearly $29.5 billion over its term, while the Reflection contract adds another $6.3 billion. Combined with the Anthropic arrangement, SpaceX stands to realize tens of billions in revenue from compute leasing in the coming years, which diversifies beyond SpaceX's traditional rocket launches and Starlink operations. The deals underscore growing demand for advanced AI training and inference capacity amid chip shortages and surging model development needs. Reflection, valued at $25 billion and focused on "American open intelligence" with government and national security ties, cited recent restrictions on closed models as validation for open-source approaches.

In a separate development, Elon Musk responded to reports that MSCI had assigned SpaceX its lowest possible ESG rating of CCC, stating, "Unfortunately, electric rockets are impossible." The assessment, issued recently and coinciding closely with SpaceX's public market debut, placed the company on par with nations like Russia in sustainability scoring and cited significant risks in environmental, social, and governance areas. MSCI flagged SpaceX's exposure to rocket emissions and other operational impacts, alongside governance concerns such as concentrated control by Musk and limited shareholder protections.

Electric propulsion systems do exist and are widely used in space. Ion thrusters and Hall-effect thrusters accelerate ionized propellant, typically xenon or krypton, using electric fields, achieving very high specific impulse, often exceeding 3,000 seconds compared to roughly 300–450 seconds for chemical rockets. This efficiency makes them ideal for satellite station-keeping, orbit raising, and deep-space missions where low thrust over long durations is sufficient. SpaceX's own Starlink satellites employ electric propulsion for these purposes.

However, launching from Earth's surface demands something entirely different: enormous thrust delivered rapidly to overcome gravity and atmospheric drag. A typical orbital-class booster must generate thrust far exceeding its weight, often in the millions of Newtons within seconds. Chemical rockets achieve this through exothermic combustion of dense propellants, producing high-mass-flow, high-velocity exhaust. Electric systems, by contrast, expel very small amounts of mass at extremely high speeds. Generating equivalent thrust would require impractical onboard power levels, massive energy storage or generation systems, and prohibitive added mass, rendering the approach infeasible with current or near-term technology.

The episode illustrates broader critiques of ESG ratings. Proponents argue they incentivize better risk management and long-term sustainability. Detractors, including Musk—who has previously called ESG a "scam"—contend that such metrics can penalize essential activities when no practical alternative exists, potentially discouraging innovation in sectors like space access. SpaceX has sought to mitigate launch-related impacts through reusability: Falcon 9 boosters have flown more than 30 times in some cases, dramatically lowering the manufacturing and emissions burden per kilogram delivered to orbit. Starship's design further emphasizes rapid reusability and methane propellant, which can theoretically be produced via sustainable pathways.

Tesla has filed a trademark application for "MEGAPOD" with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The application, carrying serial number 99893717, lists the applicant as Tesla, Inc., located at 1 Tesla Road, Austin, Texas 78725. The filing remains in "live pending" status. Tesla describes MEGAPOD as "modular data center hardware systems for artificial intelligence computing, comprised of computer servers, computer hardware for artificial intelligence processing, computer networking hardware, electrical power distribution units, and cooling" systems, reflecting the company's focus on AI efforts and expanding compute needs.