SpaceX ramped up battery purchases from CEO Elon Musk's Tesla, spending $295 million on Megapack energy storage systems in Q2 alone, with total H1 2026 spending reaching $329 million. The purchases are classified as related-party transactions and deployed at SpaceXAI's Colossus and Colossus 2 data center facilities in Greater Memphis, which now house approximately 1 gigawatt of AI compute capacity.
The trajectory is steep: xAI spent $191 million on Megapacks in 2024, $506 million in 2025, and now $329 million in H1 2026 alone—putting cumulative Megapack spending near $1 billion since 2024. Megapacks provide instant backup power and can supply additional capacity during GPU peak-demand spikes, smoothing power fluctuations that would otherwise incur additional utility charges or exceed on-site generation limits.
Tesla recognized $318 million in Q2 2026 revenue and $405 million in H1 2026 specifically from SpaceX Megapack purchases. The battery surge reflects how power-hungry modern AI infrastructure has become: as AI model training and inference workloads spike unpredictably, battery-backed power becomes as critical as compute itself, a pattern hyperscalers beyond Musk's sphere are increasingly replicating.
For architects: Megapacks are now table stakes for data center infrastructure planning at scale. The related-party transaction architecture shows the strategic advantage of vertical integration when building AI capacity; competitors without an in-house energy supplier face tighter margins and longer deployment timelines.