SPCX Slides Toward $150 as a Turbine Suit Clouds Its Anthropic Deal

The Turbine Suit Now Shadowing Colossus

SpaceX wholly owns xAI, and xAI's compute is fast becoming the part of the story that actually moves the stock. The fresh weight on SPCX is a Clean Air Act suit brought by the NAACP over the gas turbines powering the Colossus 2 data center in South Memphis. The plaintiffs, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, allege xAI is running as many as 33 unpermitted turbines that emit thousands of tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and a lower court is seen as likely to order them offline pending permits.

This is not an abstract ESG headline. Colossus 1 and 2 anchor a $45 billion, $1.25 billion-a-month compute contract with Anthropic that runs through May 2029 across more than 220,000 GPUs — and either side can walk with 90 days' notice. Power the turbines down and you put a real slice of that revenue in play. The counterweight is unusual: the Trump DOJ has moved to dismiss the case on national-security grounds, with the Pentagon arguing Grok running at Colossus 2 supports mission-critical military operations. That is a genuine backstop, but it is also a reminder that SPCX now trades on legal and regulatory risk that has nothing to do with rockets.

The Inclusion Bid Was Always Going to Fade

The mechanical driver here is the one everyone flagged in advance. SPCX joined the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, the first company with spaceflight as its core business to enter the index, triggering an estimated $4.3 billion of forced passive buying against a public float of just 3% to 5% of shares. When demand is that concentrated and the date is that well-telegraphed, index funds front-run it — the buying largely cleared into Monday's close, leaving nothing to catch the sell-the-news fade the next session.

There is a clean precedent. Palantir peaked around its own inclusion and then bled roughly 25% in the following weeks. SPCX went in already damaged, down about 28% from its $225 peak, so the pop to roughly $159 on inclusion day had little fuel behind it. Handing it back toward $150 is simply the market repricing a stock that ran on anticipation rather than a durable fresh bid.

The Setup Into August 6

The thin float that amplified the index move cuts both ways from here. SpaceX's first insider lockup begins unwinding in early August, with roughly 20% of restricted shares eligible to sell around the company's first public earnings, then staged tranches through the fall and a full 180-day expiry on December 8. Elon Musk's own stake stays locked until June 2027, but the near-term supply picture still gets heavier right as the stock has lost its passive bid.

That sets up a dense catalyst window: first earnings and the opening lockup land together in early August, against an unresolved court fight over the power feeding the Anthropic deal. For a name with a 3-to-5% float, each of those is a genuine swing factor rather than noise. A reclaim of the inclusion-day highs near $159 would argue the sell-the-news is finished; losing $150 cleanly would say the market wants to see the lockup and the turbine ruling resolve before it pays up again.