Shares in SpaceX rose about 2% on Tuesday following positive analysis from JPMorgan highlighting the company's artificial intelligence development, space chip partnership with Nvidia, and a new launch base in Louisiana.
JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth issued a buy recommendation on the private aerospace manufacturer with a target price of $240 per share, pointing to rapid progress on the company's Grok language model.
SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk and headquartered in Hawthorne, California, is the dominant commercial launch provider globally. JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest investment banks in the United States, noted that the combination of satellite infrastructure and advanced computing puts the company in a unique strategic position.
Grok artificial intelligence gains momentum
Anmuth praised the pace at which SpaceX is developing Grok, its frontier language model that competes directly with Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT.
He wrote that Grok 4.6, which launched earlier this month, had improved by five points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index compared to Grok 4.5, despite arriving only about a month later.
The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index is an independent benchmark that measures and ranks the capabilities of artificial intelligence models. Anmuth noted that Grok 4.6 currently trails only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5 in the ranking.
Looking ahead, Anmuth stated that Grok 5, expected in December, should represent a substantial advance in scale and capability.
While short-term artificial intelligence revenue across the industry is largely driven by premium computing deals, JPMorgan expects Grok monetization to improve over time, particularly among enterprise customers, making it an increasingly important growth driver.
Space chip partnership with Nvidia
Despite the positive report, investors appear to be waiting for more substantial developments, including further improvements to Grok and the deployment of orbital artificial intelligence data centers, which remain months away.
Chief Executive Elon Musk retweeted a post on social media from chipmaker Nvidia regarding its new Vera Rubin semiconductors, adding that SpaceX helped design a space-optimized version of the hardware.
Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, is the world's leading manufacturer of graphics processing units and specialized chips for artificial intelligence applications. Vera Rubin represents Nvidia's latest flagship graphics processing unit, offering faster computing than its predecessor Blackwell chip along with significantly higher token throughput.
In artificial intelligence computing, tokens represent the basic unit of data processing, essentially corresponding to individual words read and generated by a model. Higher token throughput enables greater operational efficiency and lowers computing costs.
Musk said the space-optimized Vera Rubin chips are planned to reach orbit in 2027, with deployment at significant scale scheduled for 2028.
Starship base expansion and upcoming test
To execute Musk's broader strategy, including placing artificial intelligence satellites equipped with Vera Rubin chips into orbit next year, SpaceX will rely on its Starship rocket.
Starship is SpaceX's massive, fully reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to carry heavy payloads and satellites into Earth orbit and beyond. The next test for the rocket, test flight number 14, is expected to launch in September.
SpaceX announced on Tuesday that it is building a dedicated launch base in Louisiana for Starship. Louisiana, located in the southern region of the United States along the Gulf of Mexico, will provide additional infrastructure for the expanding Starship program.
The rocket builder already launches the largest volume of equipment into orbit globally each year. SpaceX communicated over the weekend that it successfully placed another 29 Falcon 9 satellites into orbit during August alone.
Falcon 9 is SpaceX's workhorse two-stage reusable rocket, which performs the majority of global commercial satellite deployments. The company continues to increase its launch frequency as it expands both its satellite fleet and its orbital computing infrastructure.
