The Zhitong Finance App learned that Morgan Stanley pointed out in the latest research report released on October 13 that the long-term development potential of SpaceX (SPCX.US) goes far beyond rocket launches and satellite internet. Its layout in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, energy infrastructure, and space computing may push the company to become an important infrastructure provider for the next generation of smart economies.
The bank believes that the market has yet to fully recognize the growth potential of SpaceX's distributed AI inference network, so it maintains its “plus” rating and target price of $300. Compared to the closing price of $163.42 on October 12, this target price represents about 84% potential upside.
The team led by Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said that SpaceX's business covers a wide range of areas, and it is easy for investors to pay too much attention to specific businesses such as rocket launches and satellite manufacturing while ignoring the overall strategy behind these layouts.
Currently, SpaceX is not only engaged in rocket launches, but is also building launch sites, ground communication stations, and data centers to manufacture satellites, communication terminals, spacecraft, and solar panels. At the same time, the company plans to produce blades for power generation turbines to shorten the power infrastructure construction cycle, and promote semiconductor manufacturing in the US with partners, covering memory chips and logic chips. In addition, SpaceX is also acquiring telecom spectrum, developing advanced AI models, and exploring the construction of space AI infrastructure through distributed orbital clouds.
The bank believes that SpaceX has formed a highly vertically integrated system spanning various fields such as aerospace, communications, artificial intelligence, and energy, and that its business layout also targets consumers, industrial enterprises, and national security markets. According to the bank, the key to understanding SpaceX's long-term strategy lies in the interrelationships between energy, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Morgan Stanley pointed out that as a large number of robots with computational, sensing, communication, and autonomous movement capabilities are connected to each other, limited energy investment may also generate large-scale intelligent output. This formula is not a strict law of physics, but rather a strategic framework for describing the potential scale effects of distributed intelligent networks.
According to this scenario, hundreds of billions of physical AI agents may appear in Earth and near-Earth space in the future. These smart devices will be equipped with energy, computing power, heat dissipation, sensors, motion control, and communication devices, and will be interconnected through terrestrial and space infrastructure.
The bank said that the purpose of SpaceX's entry into the telecom market may not only be to become a traditional mobile network operator, but also to provide infrastructure for future data transmission between massive robots and AI devices. The bank anticipates that with the large-scale spread of physical AI agents, the data transmission demand for wireless networks may increase by several orders of magnitude in the future, or even more than 10,000 times the current level.
In this context, the distributed inference cloud being promoted by SpaceX may become one of the company's businesses with the greatest potential for growth, but has yet to receive sufficient attention from investors. Unlike traditional centralized data centers, distributed inference clouds aim to achieve intelligent processing through a large number of interconnected devices and computing nodes, so that AI computing power can be distributed more widely in the physical world.
Morgan Stanley believes that as traditional data center construction faces challenges in terms of energy supply, regulation, and social acceptance, the importance of distributed AI infrastructure may rise further. As the deployment density of physical AI agents continues to increase, the collaborative processing capabilities of the entire intelligent network will also increase, thereby driving the super-intelligent economy and the physically-intelligent economy into a new stage of growth.
The bank even used an ant colony as an analogy. A single ant's ability is limited, but a large number of ants can form groups with complex collaboration capabilities through information sharing. In the future, tens or even hundreds of billions of physical and digital AI agents may also achieve similar group collaboration through high-speed communication networks. The bank anticipates that distributed inference clouds and physical AI clusters will be an important topic of discussion among investors in the coming year.
From a valuation perspective, Morgan Stanley believes there is still a possibility that SpaceX's enterprise-level AI business will be underestimated by the market. The report points out that at a stock price slightly above 160 US dollars, the implied market-sales ratio of SpaceX's enterprise-level AI business is only a single digit lower. Morgan Stanley estimates that if each watt of AI computing power corresponds to a value of 50 US dollars, an incremental profit margin of 70%, and an EBITDA valuation of 10 times, then each additional 1 gigawatt (GW) of rated calculation power is expected to contribute about 27 US dollars to SpaceX's valuation per share, equivalent to 15% to 20% of the current stock price.
However, the bank expects SpaceX's AI computing power to be around 4.9 gigawatts by the end of 2027, which is still below the company's target of close to 10 gigawatts. Morgan Stanley said that SpaceX's fundamental growth momentum in the three major fields of aerospace, communications, and enterprise-level AI is increasing, and after the announcement of the second-quarter results, the bank's judgment on the company's prospects was also more optimistic.
Of the target price of $300, Morgan Stanley valued the SpaceX space business at $8 per share, the communications business at $118, the X and Grok business at $8, and the enterprise-level AI business at $165, respectively. It can be seen from this that enterprise-grade AI has become the business sector that has contributed the most to the bank's valuation model, followed by the satellite communications business.
At the same time, the bank stressed that SpaceX's long-term growth prospects still face implementation risks, including falling short of expectations in the reuse of Starship rockets, slowing Starlink user growth, insufficient commercialization capacity for enterprise-grade AI, and higher than expected AI infrastructure capital expenditure and computing costs. In addition, extended power infrastructure construction cycles, increased financing requirements, and delays in regulatory approval may also put pressure on the company's valuation.