Tech bull Dan Ives of Wedbush initiated coverage of SpaceX (SPCX) with an Outperform rating and a $190 price target, weighing in on a stock that has whipsawed investors in the three weeks since its record-setting initial public offering. Ives sees SpaceX as a player in the hyperscaler wars too.
Ives and the Wedbush team see SpaceX as a three-way bet on launch, connectivity, and artificial intelligence. SpaceX is "one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market," Ives wrote, and is "well-positioned to become a major hyperscaler with its vertically integrated platform across connectivity, launch, and AI infrastructure."
The $190 target implies around 12% upside from Tuesday's close of $171, but the stock dipped in early trade Wednesday.
Today's weakness aside, Ives built his bull case on the three business lines separately.
Starlink, the satellite broadband unit, remains the profit engine, with roughly 12 million subscribers as of June 5 and average revenue per user near $66. He argued the company holds less than 1% of the global telecom and broadband market, leaving a long runway.
The launch business, by contrast, he described less as a profit pool than as an internal cost center (though efficient) that makes everything else possible. SpaceX flew about 170 missions in 2025 and lofted 2,213 metric tons to orbit, more than the rest of the world combined, leaving it "less the leading provider than the market itself, with everyone else competing for the remainder."
Ives reserved his richest valuation multiple for AI and compute, the vertical he said anchors the sum-of-the-parts, as did SpaceX did itself in its IPO prospectus. That business recently booked big compute deals in the neighborhood of $28 billion annually, led by deals with Anthropic and Google using SpaceX's Colossus data centers for AI compute for products like Claude and Gemini, respectively.
The so-called hyperscalers like Amazon (AMZN) AWS, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, and Google's (GOOGL) Cloud unit run global, multi-client cloud platforms offering self-service and a software stack (databases, networking, managed services) sold on demand. Ives admits that SpaceX is not a traditional hypescaler as it doesn't offer all the solutions of say AWS or Azure, but it can rent out its compute cluster, off excess compute as a revenue generator.
SpaceX's advantage is that it owns a gigawatt-scale compute cluster, Ives said, and the company can build more of it faster and cheaper than anyone else. The drawbacks with its compute deals are that they are cancellable within 90 days, so not as durable as traditional multi-year deals.