SpaceX stock rises with data center overhaul, budding UK defense deal in focus

SpaceEx ( SPCX ) stock is on the move Thursday as investors sort through a number of headlines affecting the rocket-and-satellite company.

The most consequential came from The Information , which reported that SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk are overhauling how the company builds its data centers, a shift that could slow the pace of new construction.

According to the report, a new management team from the company's rocket division is prioritizing reliability over speed, installing more backup power and cooling systems, and testing data centers more thoroughly before they go live.

The change is a departure from what Musk and xAI (now part of SpaceX) used to build at its Colossus campus in Tennessee, where the AI unit brought its first data center online in just 122 days, a timeline Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang called "superhuman."

But that speed came with trade-offs like frequent outages, including a construction-related outage at the Memphis facility last week that knocked some Grok models offline and affected compute customers like Anthropic ( ANTH.PVT ) and Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ), The Information said.

More than a dozen data center leaders have left in recent weeks and have been replaced by SpaceX engineers. Musk, who has visited the Memphis site nearly every Sunday, wrote on X after the outage that the company was "taking corrective action to ensure this does not happen again."

While the data center build-out potentially slows, SpaceX's defense business is getting a boost.

Reuters reported that the UK has spent nearly $40 million on SpaceX satellite services, deepening the UK's reliance on Musk's company. The Defense Ministry has bought around $17.6 million in Starshield services — the military-grade version of Starlink, with enhanced encryption — plus $22.3 million in standard Starlink, deploying about 1,000 Starshield and 500 Starlink terminals.

The UK is the first country outside the US to publicly acknowledge its use of Starshield.

Thursday's slight gains came even as SpaceX stock absorbed a new supply of shares. About 319 million insider shares (around 7% of insider stock) became eligible for sale on Wednesday, the 90-day mark since SpaceX's June 12 IPO.

SpaceX went public at $135 per share in June, raising a record $85.7 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation, while floating less than 5% of its stock.

Pras Subramanian is Lead Transportation Reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram .