SpaceX’s amended S-1 IPO filing, published yesterday, reveals that xAI purchased another $269 million worth of Tesla Megapack products in April 2026 alone. That single month exceeds what xAI spent on Tesla Megapacks in all of 2024.
The purchase brings total Megapack spending by xAI to roughly $1 billion since 2024 — a staggering figure that underscores both how power-hungry AI data centers have become and how deeply intertwined Elon Musk’s companies are.
The numbers from the filing
The related-party transaction disclosures in SpaceX’s S-1/A filing break down xAI’s Tesla purchases with unusual granularity. Here’s the full Megapack purchase history:
- 2024: $191 million
- 2025: $506 million
- Q1 2026 (January–March): $34 million
- April 2026: $269 million
That’s roughly $1 billion in Megapack products over less than two and a half years.
The filing states: “xAI is party to certain commercial, licensing, and support agreements with Tesla. Under these agreements, xAI obtained goods and services of $191 million in 2024, $506 million in 2025, and $303 million from January 1, 2026 through April 30, 2026 ($269 million of which relates to purchases of Megapacks in April 2026).”
Beyond Megapacks, the S-1 also confirms SpaceX purchased $131 million worth of Cybertrucks at MSRP in 2025 — a purchase we already knew inflated Cybertruck sales numbers. SpaceX itself also obtained $147 million in goods and services from Tesla in 2025, up from just $4 million in 2024.
As we detailed when Tesla’s own 10-K/A filing came out, the web of related-party transactions between Musk’s companies is growing rapidly, with Tesla recognizing $573 million in revenue from SpaceX and xAI in 2025.
Why xAI needs so many Megapacks
xAI’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis and its expanding data center footprint require massive, reliable power capacity. The Megapacks serve as grid-scale battery storage — buffering power from the grid and from on-site generation to keep AI training workloads running around the clock.
xAI has already deployed 168 Megapack units at its Memphis facility and planned to scale to roughly 1 GWh of buffering capacity. At the scale xAI is building — targeting 2 GW of compute capacity — the battery storage needs are enormous.
For Tesla’s energy division, which generated $12.8 billion in revenue in 2025, the xAI purchases represent a meaningful chunk of business. The $573 million Tesla recognized from SpaceX and xAI alone accounted for roughly 4.5% of total energy revenue.
The natural gas problem
Here’s the part that should concern anyone who cares about Tesla’s mission. While xAI is buying billions in Megapacks — which is good — the power those Megapacks are storing and dispatching comes overwhelmingly from natural gas.
xAI has been running nearly 50 gas turbines at its Mississippi data center, won permits to build a 41-turbine natural gas power plant in Southaven, and according to its own permit applications, the combined facilities could emit more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.
As we wrote last week, there’s a glaring contradiction between Tesla’s stated mission — moving from a “mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy” to a “solar electric economy” — and xAI’s aggressive embrace of natural gas generation.
xAI announced plans for a small 100 MW solar farm adjacent to the Colossus facility back in late 2025, but that’s a token gesture compared to the gigawatts of gas generation xAI is deploying.
Electrek’s Take
The Megapack purchases are genuinely good news for Tesla Energy, but a billion dollars in orders from a single customer over two years validates that its growth is increasingly reliant on the Musk companies.
But more importantly, we’d love to see SpaceX and xAI buy Tesla solar panels and inverters alongside those Megapacks. Right now, the Megapacks at xAI’s data centers are essentially storing and dispatching fossil fuel power. That’s a perfectly valid use of battery storage from a grid-reliability standpoint, but it’s not exactly advancing the “solar electric economy” that Tesla’s master plan promises.
xAI is planning to spend $2.8 billion on more natural gas generation. Imagine if even a fraction of that went to utility-scale Tesla solar installations paired with Megapacks. The data centers would still get the reliable power they need, xAI would reduce its growing emissions liability (the EPA is already tightening rules on data center generators), and Musk’s companies would at least be consistent in their stated commitment to clean energy.
The fact that Tesla is selling its energy storage products to a sister company that burns natural gas around the clock is not a great look. Megapacks are a piece of the clean energy puzzle, but they’re not the whole picture — and SpaceX’s IPO filing makes that gap harder to ignore.
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