SpaceX Stock Rises Over 5% on Bullish AI Forecasts

SpaceX shares climbed roughly 5% to about $148 on Thursday, recovering from two consecutive down sessions as analysts updated forecasts for the company’s artificial intelligence business and raised price targets.

Bernstein SocGen Group kept an Outperform rating and maintained a $248 price target. Analyst Douglas Harned projects AI revenue to rise from $24.6 billion in 2026 to $115.1 billion in 2027. Bernstein’s model increases total revenue from $46.4 billion in 2026 to $150.4 billion in 2027, with most of the gain attributed to AI. The firm’s valuation incorporates potential new lines of business, including orbital data centers.

Oppenheimer raised its price target to $280 from $250 and kept an Outperform rating. That target implies about 100% upside from recent trading near $139. Oppenheimer highlighted SpaceX’s vertical integration-access to data, capital, and GPUs through a relationship with Nvidia, along with rapid infrastructure build capacity-as advantages for an AI platform. The firm pointed to SpaceX’s acquisition of Cursor as strengthening its coding and agentic capabilities, with expected benefits across products such as Grok Bot, Grok 4.6 and anticipated gains with Grok 5.0.

Oppenheimer increased its long-term revenue estimates by roughly 10% based on stronger AI compute pricing and said heavier capital spending could lift that uplift to about 20%. The firm noted that compute infrastructure remains a constraint on industry growth.

A key risk for the stock is the large and steady flow of newly tradable shares from staggered lockup expirations. Under the current schedule, roughly 912 million shares became available on Aug. 6, about 319 million on Aug. 20, roughly 600 million are expected in September and more than 630 million are slated for October. By the end of 2026, about 4.9 billion shares are projected to be available for trading, equal to roughly 70% of SpaceX shares not held by Elon Musk.

The increasing supply of tradable stock has been cited as a factor in earlier price weakness; the share price fell below $105 in July from a $135 IPO price as investors withheld buying ahead of potential profit-taking. The staggered lockup schedule will continue to expand the pool of tradable shares through 2026.