SpaceX stock rose early on Tuesday after closing at its $135 June initial public offering price on Monday. JPMorgan's positive view of the company's artificial intelligence might be giving shares a boost.
In a note on Tuesday, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth praised the rate at which SpaceX is developing Grok, its frontier large-language model that competes with the likes of Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "Grok 4.6, released earlier this month, improved [by] five points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index versus Grok 4.5 despite arriving just about one month later, and trails only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 & Claude Opus 5 on the leaderboard," wrote Anmuth.
The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index is an independent benchmark that ranks AI model capabilities.
Better AI is important. It's what drives enterprise sales. Anthropic, for example, is growing rapidly mainly due to the success of its leading AI models.
"Grok 5, expected by December, should represent a substantial step up in scale & capability," added Anmuth. "While near-term AI revenue is largely driven by premium compute deals...we expect improving Grok monetization, particularly among enterprises, to become an increasingly important driver over time."
He rates SpaceX stock Buy and has a $240 price target for shares.
The stock is nowhere near that level now. Early trading has been interesting, but shares entered Tuesday where they started-at the $135 IPO price. Investors appear to be waiting for more substantial developments from SpaceX, such as greater improvements to Grok and the launching of AI data centers into orbit.
That's still months away. CEO Elon Musk retweeted a post from chip maker Nvidia about its Vera Rubin semiconductors, adding that SpaceX has helped design a "space-optimized" version that is planned for orbit in 2027 with "significant scale" in 2028.
Vera Rubin is Nvidia's latest AI graphics processing unit (GPU), offering faster compute than its Blackwell chips and much better token throughput. Tokens are the unit of AI computing, essentially every word the AI model reads and outputs. Higher throughput means more efficiency, which means lower costs.
As for space, it's a harsh environment with higher radiation levels and different cooling modalities. Specialized hardware is needed to keep computers computing above the clouds. Nvidia is working on space chips because SpaceX plans to build a constellation of AI computing satellites. Musk believes that using the sun to power the chips will give SpaceX a cost advantage over terrestrial data centers that rely on traditional electricity sources.
For Musk's plan to work-including putting AI satellites with Vera Rubin chips into orbit next year-SpaceX's huge, fully reusable Starship rocket will need to be ready. It's still in testing, with test number 14 likely to be launched in September.
SpaceX stock was up 1.6% in early Tuesday trading at $137.10, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 0.3% and 0.1%, respectively. Shares have been above $225 and below $105 since the IPO.