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

Summary

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. Get Redwire alerts:Sign UpWhere SpaceX's IPO Money Is Actually GoingMost 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. Redwire Today$17.48 -0.01 (-0.03%) As of 05/22/2026 03:59 PM Eastern This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more.52-Week Range$4.87▼$22.25Price Target$14.22 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,...