SpaceX NASDAQ: SPCX The IPO is grabbing headlines, but Luke Lango of InvestorPlace says investors are looking at the story through a much narrower lens. Real entrepreneurship isn’t just a rocket company going public, it’s the decades-long merger of four separate businesses into one AI-driven empire, and stocks riding that wave are just starting to move.
Where SpaceX’s IPO Money Is Actually Going
Most investors think of SpaceX as a rocket story, but Lango puts it differently.
Since acquiring X and folding in Grok’s xAI models and data generation capabilities, SpaceX has quietly become an AI infrastructure game. And the IPO, which Lango expects to land in June, is primarily about raising money to launch data centers into orbit.
The economics behind it are worth understanding. Terrestrial data centers are resource constrained: land, water, and energy costs tend to be higher over time. But orbital data centers face zero earth costs, reduced cooling costs in near-zero-zero conditions, and lower energy costs due to uninterrupted sun exposure. The primary cost driver is hardware, and hardware follows well-known cost reduction curves. Construction costs on Earth are rising; the cost of building space is falling.
Redwire Today
- 52 week interval
- $4.87
▼
$22.25
- Target Value
- $14.22
The way Lango wants to play it is not the SpaceX IPO itself. This company is Redwire Corporation NYSE: RDW.
Redwire builds space-based solar panels—the same technology that powers the International Space Station—and Lango believes that energy can’t actually be replicated indoors with SpaceX.
When the IPO closes and money starts flowing into orbital compute, expect Redwire to win a large share of that spend. Lango has priced the stock around triple digits over the past 12 months.
In context, he pointed to Planet Labs PBC NYSE: PLRocket Lab USA NASDAQ: RKLBand AST SpaceMobile NASDAQ: ASTS as previous space trades already range from single-digit to multiples of that — part of the broader expansion of space infrastructure stocks that is gaining momentum ahead of the SpaceX IPO.
Tesla’s Real Work In The Kingdom Has Nothing To Do With Electric Cars
Lango learns from Tesla NASDAQ: TSLA it removes the EV narrative entirely.
In his framework, Tesla is the distribution arm of the empire, the virtual layer through which general artificial intelligence finally reaches the real world with autonomous cars and human robots.
Cyber Cab production begins. Optimus is on his way to the start. Terrafab, a highly integrated semiconductor facility being built in Texas, is designed to bring the global supply chain under one roof and remove production bottlenecks that slow down both systems.
Hesai Group Today
As of 05/22/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
- 52 week interval
- $14.69
▼
$30.85
- The P/E ratio
- 46.89
- Target Value
- $29.96
His pick tied for Tesla’s AI road is the Hesai Group NASDAQ: HSAIa Chinese LiDAR manufacturer and one of the world’s leading suppliers 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 plans to double annual production capacity by 2026 to more than 4 million lidar units.
Controversy: although Elon Musk has long been against LiDAR for cars, he has not made such a statement about humanoid robots.
Working in homes and factories requires the level of redundancy that Lango believes LiDAR will require, and Hesai’s cost structure is in line with Tesla’s goal of a sub-$20,000 Optimus robot.
HSAI ran hard before retreating. Lango called the current level an attractive entry point ahead of what he expects will be a significant re-scaling once sensors are confirmed as a core component of virtual AI.
The Profit of Data Hiding Within Elon’s Most Overlooked Legacy
A common knock on data as an AI input is that it is for sale. Anyone can wipe the web. Lango pulls back from that, drawing a contrast between structured published content and the real-time, unfiltered human speech generated on social media.
UX, in his view, resides in one of the largest human-like data sets in existence, forming not only a social platform but the fuel source for the entire AI training regime. The more AI needs to be human, the more valuable data becomes.
That sets up his next choice. All the big hyperscalers—Alphabet (NASDAQ GOOGL), Amazon NASDAQ: AMZNMicrosoft NASDAQ: MSFTMetha NASDAQ: META-Powerfully migrated to custom silicon. No business in Elon’s empire has made a similar move.
ARM Today
As of 05/22/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
- 52 week interval
- $100.02
▼
$315.00
- The P/E ratio
- 364.89
- Target Value
- $208.79
Lango expects the changes, and expects them to be built on ARM Holdings NASDAQ: ARM properties.
The announcement of a partnership between ARM and any Elon-affiliated organization could trigger a significant rebalancing, the kind of movement partner news has brought to other names around AI.
ARM is already working on a custom silicon theme; Lango considers you a dynamic name for accumulation in pullbacks.
For investors looking for a low volatility path to a similar opportunity, check out SoftBank Group OTC: SFTBY as a background game. SoftBank has a large stake in ARM, a large investment in OpenAI, and has been aggressive throughout the AI semiconductor supply chain. It won’t deliver as much upside as ARM directly, but it does provide broader exposure to AI architecture with less focus on a single stock.
Compute Play Behind XAI Desires
Nebius Group Today
As of 05/22/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
- 52 week interval
- $34.72
▼
$233.73
- The P/E ratio
- 69.28
- Target Value
- $182.75
xAI is the brain of the empire, the model training function that makes everything else work. The way to play it, says Lango, is the same way you would play any expansion of AI computing: more infrastructure.
That points to neoclouds, independent computing providers that serve a structurally underserved market.
His top neocloud pick is the Nebius Group NASDAQ: NBISa European-focused GPU cloud operator with roots in Yandex that regrouped after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Triple-digit revenue growth and improving margins make the case for valuations, even after a remarkable recent performance.
Another name for his neocloud is CoreWeave NASDAQ: CRWV.
The market has punished CoreWeave for its leverage and perceived dependence on OpenAI. That concern is true, but CoreWeave is also expanding its customer base, including an estimated $21 billion AI infrastructure deal announced in April 2026.
CoreWeave Today
As of 05/22/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
- 52 week interval
- $63.80
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$187.00
- Target Value
- $129.63
Lango notes that xAI was a CoreWeave customer before Elon Musk built the massive Colossus cluster in Memphis, as the customer base is wider than the bears say.
What’s more, the destructive increase in the reduction is faster in the construction cycle, and right now the buildout is what is happening. The very thing that drives investors away is steepness. He put CoreWeave in the same early innings category as Redwire, a stock the market has been slow to believe, setting what he sees as a significant advance.
The line across all four pillars is straight: SpaceX builds the infrastructure, Tesla distributes the intelligence, X flies the models, and XAI runs the brains.
Whether that merger eventually produces a single publicly traded entity or remains a collection of separate companies, the stocks placed around each pillar—RDW, HSAI, ARM, and NBIS—is where Lango says the opportunity is being built today.
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