According to a research report released by Morgan Stanley on October 13, SpaceX (SPCX.US) has long-term development potential that goes far beyond rocket launches and satellite internet. Its positioning in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy infrastructure, and space computing could drive the company to become a critical infrastructure provider for the next-generation intelligent economy. The bank believes the market has not yet fully recognized the growth potential of SpaceX's distributed AI inference network, and therefore maintains its "Overweight" rating and $300 price target. Compared to the closing price of $163.42 on October 12, this target price implies approximately 84% upside potential.

The team led by Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas stated that SpaceX has an extremely broad business scope, and investors tend to focus excessively on specific operations such as rocket launches and satellite manufacturing while overlooking the overarching strategy behind these initiatives. Currently, SpaceX is not only engaged in rocket launches but is also building launch sites, ground communication stations, and data centers, as well as manufacturing satellites, communication terminals, spacecraft, and solar panels. At the same time, the company plans to produce blades for power generation turbines to shorten the cycle of power infrastructure construction, and is working with partners to advance domestic semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, covering memory chips and logic chips. Additionally, SpaceX is acquiring telecommunications spectrum, developing advanced AI models, and exploring the construction of space-based AI infrastructure through distributed orbital cloud computing.

The bank believes that SpaceX has formed a highly vertically integrated system spanning multiple fields including aerospace, communications, artificial intelligence, and energy, with its business layout serving consumers, industrial enterprises, and national security markets simultaneously. In the bank's view, the key to understanding SpaceX's long-term strategy lies in the interrelationship between energy, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Morgan Stanley pointed out that as a large number of robots with computing, perception, communication, and autonomous action capabilities become interconnected, even limited energy input can potentially generate enormous intelligent output. This formula is not a strict physical law but rather a strategic framework used to describe the potential scale effects of distributed intelligent networks. Under this vision, hundreds of billions of physical AI agents could emerge on Earth and in near-Earth space in the future. These agents would be equipped with energy, computing power, cooling, sensors, motion control, and communication devices, and would be interconnected through ground-based and space-based infrastructure.

The bank stated that SpaceX's entry into the telecommunications market may not be aimed solely at becoming a traditional mobile network operator, but rather at providing infrastructure for data transmission between massive numbers of robots and AI devices in the future. The bank estimates that with the large-scale proliferation of physical AI agents, future wireless network data transmission demand could grow by several orders of magnitude, potentially reaching more than 10,000 times current levels. Against this backdrop, the distributed inference cloud that SpaceX is advancing could become one of the company's businesses with the greatest growth potential that has not yet received sufficient investor attention. Unlike traditional centralized data centers, distributed inference clouds aim to achieve intelligent processing through a large number of interconnected devices and computing nodes, distributing AI computing power more broadly throughout the physical world. Morgan Stanley believes that as traditional data center construction faces challenges related to energy supply, regulation, and social acceptance, the importance of distributed AI infrastructure may further increase. As the deployment density of physical AI agents continues to rise, the collaborative processing capability of the entire agent network will also strengthen, driving the superintelligent economy and physical intelligence economy into a new growth phase.

The bank even drew an analogy to ant colonies: a single ant has limited capabilities, but a large number of ants can form a collective with complex collaborative abilities through information sharing. In the future, tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of physical and digital AI agents could also achieve similar collective collaboration through high-speed communication networks. The bank expects that distributed inference clouds and physical AI clusters could become important topics of investor discussion in the coming year. From a valuation perspective, Morgan Stanley believes that SpaceX's enterprise-level AI business may still be undervalued by the market. The report noted that at a stock price slightly above $160, the implied price-to-sales ratio for SpaceX's enterprise-level AI business is only in the low single digits. Morgan Stanley calculated that assuming each watt of AI computing power corresponds to $50 in value, incremental margins reach 70%, and a 10x EBITDA valuation is applied, then each additional gigawatt (GW) of rated computing power could contribute approximately $27 per share to SpaceX's valuation, equivalent to 15% to 20% of the current stock price.

However, the bank estimates that by the end of 2027, SpaceX's AI computing power will be approximately 4.9 gigawatts, still below the company's stated target of nearly 10 gigawatts. Morgan Stanley stated that SpaceX's fundamental growth momentum across its three major areas—aerospace, communications, and enterprise-level AI—is strengthening, and following the release of second-quarter results, the bank's outlook on the company has become more optimistic. Within the $300 price target, Morgan Stanley assigned valuations of $8 per share for SpaceX's aerospace business, $118 for communications, $8 for X and Grok, and $165 for enterprise-level AI. It is evident that enterprise-level AI has become the largest contributing business segment in the bank's valuation model, followed by satellite communications. The bank also emphasized that SpaceX's long-term growth prospects still face execution risks, including slower-than-expected progress on Starship rocket reusability, slowing Starlink user growth, insufficient commercialization capability in enterprise-level AI, and higher-than-expected AI infrastructure capital expenditures and computing costs. Additionally, extended power infrastructure construction cycles, increased financing needs, and regulatory approval delays could also put pressure on the company's valuation.