SpaceX Gets the Attention, But These 4 Stocks Could Get the Returns

Key Points

• Luke Lango of InvestorPlace argues that Tesla, SpaceX, X, and XAI are converging into a single AI-driven empire, and the SpaceX IPO expected in June is the catalyst that sets the whole story in motion
• Lango's top SpaceX-connected pick is Redwire Corporation, a space-based solar panel manufacturer he believes is positioned to capture a significant share of Elon Musk's orbital data center spending
• The bigger opportunity, Lango argues, isn't the SpaceX IPO itself, but the ecosystem of stocks positioned around each pillar of the empire before the convergence plays out

The SpaceX NASDAQ: SPCX IPO is dominating headlines, but Luke Lango of InvestorPlace says investors are looking at this story through too narrow a lens. The real trade isn't just one rocket company going public, it's a decades-long convergence of four separate business ventures into one AI-driven empire, and the stocks riding that wave are already starting to move.

Where SpaceX's IPO Money Is Actually Going

Most investors think of SpaceX as a rocket story, but Lango frames it differently.

Since acquiring X and folding in xAI's Grok models and data generation capabilities, SpaceX has quietly become an AI infrastructure play. And the IPO, which Lango expects to land in June, is primarily about raising capital to launch data centers into orbit.

The economics behind that move are worth understanding. Terrestrial data centers are resource-constrained: land, water, and energy costs trend higher over time. But orbital data centers face no land cost, reduced cooling costs in the near-absolute-zero environment of space, and minimal energy costs thanks to uninterrupted solar exposure. The primary cost driver is hardware, and hardware follows known cost-reduction curves. The cost of building on Earth goes up; the cost of building in space goes down.

The way Lango wants to play it isn't the SpaceX IPO itself. It's Redwire Corporation NYSE: RDW.

Redwire builds space-based solar panels—the same technology that powers the International Space Station—and Lango believes that capability is essentially non-replicable in-house by SpaceX.

Once the IPO closes and capital starts flowing into orbital compute, he expects Redwire to win a significant portion of that spending. Lango called it a potential triple-digit stock within 12 months.

For context, he pointed to Planet Labs PBC NYSE: PL, Rocket Lab USA NASDAQ: RKLB, and AST SpaceMobile NASDAQ: ASTS as earlier space trades that have already run from single-digit prices to multiples of that — part of a broader wave of space infrastructure stocks gaining momentum ahead of the SpaceX IPO.

Tesla's Real Job in the Empire Has Nothing to Do With Electric Vehicles

Lango's read on Tesla NASDAQ: TSLA strips the EV narrative away entirely.

In his framework, Tesla is the distribution arm of the empire, the physical layer through which artificial general intelligence eventually reaches the real world via autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

Cyber Cab production is just beginning. Optimus is in early ramp. The Terrafab, a vertically integrated semiconductor facility under construction in Texas, is designed to collapse a sprawling global supply chain under one roof and remove the production bottlenecks slowing both programs down.

His pick tied to Tesla's physical AI ramp is Hesai Group NASDAQ: HSAI, a Chinese LiDAR manufacturer and one of the world's leading providers of that sensor technology.

Hesai has been expanding beyond automotive ADAS into robotics and “physical AI” applications, and the company said in January that it planned to double annual production capacity in 2026 to more than 4 million lidar units.

The argument: while Elon Musk has long opposed LiDAR for cars, he has made no such statement about humanoid robots.

Operating in homes and factories demands a level of spatial redundancy that Lango believes will require LiDAR, and Hesai's cost structure aligns with Tesla's goal of a sub-$20,000 Optimus robot.

HSAI ran hard before pulling back. Lango called the current level an attractive entry point ahead of what he expects to be a significant re-rating once sensors are validated as a core component of physical AI.

The Data Advantage Hiding Inside Elon's Most Overlooked Asset

The conventional knock on data as an AI input is that it's commoditized. Anyone can scrape the web. Lango pushes back on that, drawing a distinction between structured published content and the real-time, unfiltered human expression generated on social platforms.

X, in his view, sits on one of the largest and most humanlike datasets in existence, making it not just a social platform but the fuel source for the entire empire's AI training operation. The more humanlike AI needs to become, the more valuable that data gets.

That sets up his next pick. Every major hyperscaler—Alphabet (NASDAQ GOOGL), Amazon NASDAQ: AMZN, Microsoft NASDAQ: MSFT, Meta NASDAQ: META—has moved aggressively toward custom silicon. No entity within Elon's empire has made a comparable move yet.

Lango expects that changes, and he expects it to be built on top of ARM Holdings NASDAQ: ARM architecture.

A partnership announcement between ARM and any Elon-affiliated entity could trigger a significant re-rating, the kind of move that partnership news has delivered for other AI-adjacent names.

ARM has already run on the custom silicon theme; Lango treats it as a momentum name to accumulate on pullbacks.

For investors who want a lower-volatility path to the same opportunity, he flagged SoftBank Group OTC: SFTBY as a backdoor play. SoftBank holds a substantial stake in ARM, a major investment in OpenAI, and has been aggressive across the AI semiconductor supply chain. It won't deliver the same upside multiple as ARM directly, but it offers broader exposure to the AI buildout with less single-stock concentration.

The Compute Play Behind XAI's Ambitions

xAI is the brain of the empire, the model training operation that makes everything else functional. The way to play it, Lango said, is the same way you'd play any AI compute expansion: more infrastructure.

That points to neoclouds, the independent compute providers servicing a structurally undersupplied market.

His top neocloud pick is Nebius Group NASDAQ: NBIS, a European-focused GPU cloud operator with roots in Yandex that reincorporated after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Triple-digit revenue growth and improving margins make the valuation case, even after a significant recent run.

His other neocloud name is CoreWeave NASDAQ: CRWV.

The market has punished CoreWeave for its leverage and perceived dependence on OpenAI. That concern is real, but CoreWeave has also broadened its customer base, including a roughly $21 billion expanded AI infrastructure agreement with Meta announced in April 2026.

Lango counters that xAI was a CoreWeave customer before Elon Musk built the Colossus supercluster in Memphis, as the customer base is broader than the bears acknowledge.

More to the point, leverage that hurts in a slowdown accelerates in a buildout cycle, and right now the buildout is what's happening. The very thing that kept investors away is becoming a tailwind. He put CoreWeave in the same early-innings category as Redwire, a stock the market has been slow to believe, setting up what he sees as a significant move ahead.

The throughline across all four pillars is straightforward: SpaceX builds the infrastructure, Tesla distributes the intelligence, X fuels the models, and XAI runs the brain.

Whether that convergence ultimately produces one publicly traded entity or remains a constellation of separate companies, the stocks positioned around each pillar—RDW, HSAI, ARM, and NBIS—are where Lango says the opportunity is taking shape today.