Every account of SpaceX's new compute contract is chasing the same missing fact: who signed it. That leads nowhere, because the name would not tell you what the contract is worth. Two other things would, and CFO Bret Johnsen gave one of them away on 10 September: the deal bills $1.11 billion a month from 1 December, and these agreements, he said, are "90-day with a 90-day out, so roughly six-month commits."
Those two sentences do not sit comfortably together. One is the largest single hosting figure SpaceX has ever put in public. The other says how little of it the company is entitled to collect.
Nothing has been filed, and Johnsen did the annualising himself
Johnsen spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. No filing sits behind any of it — no 8-K, no contract exhibit — so every figure here is a spoken remark, read from a published transcript rather than from SpaceX's own webcast.
He made the annualisation himself: "we closed another hosting deal, and that translates into about $1.11 billion a month starting December 1st of this year, which is another roughly $13 billion of ARR." He added that SpaceX is on track for $100 billion of ARR "by the end of this year, with annualizing our December number" — the December-month basis we set out last month, confirmed rather than changed.
Twelve months of billing, six months of obligation
Between those two disclosures sits a conversion the tape has skipped.
- $1.11B a month × 12 = $13.32B. Johnsen's own step, and the figure now circulating.
- $1.11B × 6 = $6.66B. What a "roughly six-month commit" is worth at that rate.
- $6.66B ÷ $13.32B = 50%. Half the annualised number is contracted. Renewal has to supply the rest.
A 90-day commitment with a 90-day exit binds the counterparty for one quarter and requires a quarter's notice to leave — Johnsen's "roughly six months." Annualising that is not wrong, but it prices twelve months of a relationship either side can end after six.
The one contract whose exit clause you can read
None of this is an inference about a structure nobody has seen. SpaceX's June agreement with Reflection AI, for GB300 capacity at Colossus 2, was reported at $6.3 billion running from 1 July 2026 to the end of 2029 — and it carries a 90-day exit clause exercisable by either party once the first three months have elapsed.
Reflection's deal is the arithmetic in miniature:
- Headline value: $6.3B over 42 months.
- Enforceable at six months of $150M a month: $0.9B.
- $6.3B ÷ $0.9B = 7.0×.
Headline value is seven times the commitment. Johnsen's "almost all of them, if not all of them" says the new contract is built the same way.
How many megawatts? Somewhere between 266 and 2,125
Size is the other undisclosed quantity, and nobody outside SpaceX can work it out — because the two published figures that convert dollars into megawatts differ by a factor of eight.
Implied megawatts are ours; both revenue-per-watt figures are the company's
| Revenue per watt-year | Where it comes from | Implied megawatts |
|---|---|---|
| $6.27 | June quarter, as reported | 2,125 MW |
| $30.00 | Musk's guess, low end | 444 MW |
| $50.00 | Musk's guess, high end | 266 MW |
The June-quarter rate is $2,194M of AI solutions and infrastructure revenue, annualised, over 1.4 GW of period-end nameplate compute — the same derivation we published on 23 August. Nameplate is not energised capacity and not leased capacity, so the true rate on capacity actually earning revenue is higher and the implied megawatts correspondingly lower; on the quarter's average capacity of about 1.2 GW it is $7.31 and 1,821 MW. Musk's range is from the August 4 earnings call, where he called it 'just a guess' and applied it to Rubin-generation hardware not yet installed. SpaceX expects to end 2026 with more than 2 GW of nameplate compute.
At the rate SpaceX actually earned in the June quarter, one contract would need about 2.1 GW — essentially the whole fleet the company expects to be running at year end, and a like-for-like comparison, since both figures are nameplate. At Musk's guessed rate it takes an eighth of it. Both numbers are SpaceX's own, and neither is a price list: Musk put the range at "somewhere between $30 and $50" a watt on the August call, then immediately added, "This is just a guess."
So the megawatts matter more than the counterparty, and withholding them leaves the contract unsized rather than merely anonymous.
The $3.4 billion is a sum, not a fifth deal
Johnsen's remarks are also being reported as more than $3.4 billion a month of AI compute by December. Those are the existing books added together: Anthropic at $1.25B a month, Google at $0.92B and Reflection at $0.15B come to $2.32B, and December is simply the first month all three run alongside the new $1.11B. $2.32B + $1.11B = $3.43B.
What would make this wrong
If SpaceX files the agreement and it carries a fixed term with no exit right, the six-month reading fails and $13.3 billion is the right way to describe it.
The strongest case against the finding is that a 90-day out is theoretical: nobody queues years for energised capacity and then walks away from it in a shortage, and Johnsen said as much — "you can see a situation, even when you are doing six months at a time, that likely continues beyond that." He is probably right. But that is a forecast about demand, not a term of the contract, and SpaceX draws the same line itself: the $14.1 billion of contracted sales it reported for the June quarter is defined as contract value over the non-cancellable period. SpaceX already measures the enforceable part separately. The $13.3 billion figure does not.
Johnsen's remarks — $1.11 billion a month from 1 December, "roughly $13 billion of ARR", the "90-day with a 90-day out, so roughly six-month commits" characterisation and the $100 billion December-annualised target — are from the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference fireside on 10 September 2026, read from a published transcript; SpaceX has filed nothing on the agreement and named no counterparty, term in years or megawatt figure. Musk's "$30 and $50" a watt and "This is just a guess" are from the August 4 earnings call, as is the year-end target of more than 2 GW. Revenue of $2,194M from AI solutions and infrastructure, 1.4 GW of period-end nameplate compute and $14.1 billion of contracted sales are as reported for the June quarter. The Reflection AI, Anthropic and Google monthly figures and Reflection's exit clause are press-reported and unfiled. Every division, ratio and implied megawatt figure here is ours. SPCX.
