TD Cowen's $200 SpaceX call rests on AI leases tenants can cancel in 90 days

A $200 target built on rented machines

TD Cowen opened coverage of SpaceX on Tuesday with a Buy rating and a $200 target, about 35% above a close of $149.24, up 2.6% on the day. The argument is not the rockets. SpaceX came public in June at $135 a share in the largest IPO on record, and its first initiation treats it as an AI landlord. ¹²

Analyst John Blackledge expects terrestrial compute leasing to book $14.4 billion of revenue this year, about 35% of SpaceX's total, then $66 billion in 2027, 58% of sales and a majority of the company by the first quarter of 2027. Four tenants carry the model: Anthropic, Google, Reflection AI, and an unnamed fourth that starts paying $1.1 billion a month in December. He expects another 4 gigawatts leased across 2027 and 2028 at $46 billion to $50 billion per gigawatt. ¹

The anchor tenant keeps a 90-day exit

The same day, a confidential Anthropic IPO prospectus seen by Reuters↗ showed agreements worth up to $84.5 billion through 2029 for Nvidia-based capacity from xAI, the AI business SpaceX acquired in February, largely cancelable with 90 days' notice. The May agreement↗ underneath pays $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for roughly 325,000 GPUs on the Colossus cluster. ³⁴⁶

About 80% of Anthropic's $518 billion, ten-year compute stack is non-cancelable or payable regardless of use: at least $111.1 billion to Google, $110 billion to Amazon, $31.4 billion to Microsoft, and $161.2 billion of Broadcom leases. ⁴ The xAI line sits in the cancelable slice, the one big commitment Anthropic can walk from in 90 days. ⁷⁸ Anthropic's cheapest exit from half a trillion dollars of compute obligations runs through SpaceX, and the tenant holding it lost $42 billion last year. ⁹

The debt has no such clause

TD Cowen's model requires $160 billion of AI capex in 2027, no free cash flow until 2030, and $225 billion of new debt from 2027 through 2029. ¹ SpaceX's filings↗ already show the shape of it: second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, nearly double a year earlier, capex of $18.4 billion, free cash flow of minus $16 billion, and $39.4 billion of debt, nearly triple the end of 2024. ⁵

Ten more gigawatts of demand, at elevated rates

The demand is real: Blackledge's channel checks find an active requirement for about 10 more gigawatts, 2 to 3 of them in Southeast Asia, where builds take 6 to 9 months rather than the two years a United States site needs. Anthropic says its own growth is "limited principally by the availability of compute." His caveat: "The key will be securing new customers at these elevated rates." ¹³

December brings the unnamed tenant's first $1.1 billion month; 2027 brings the debt. SpaceX converts rocket risk into landlord paper, and the labs rent rather than build. The tenants keep a 90-day exit. The lenders do not. ¹