Elon Musk May Have Ended the October AI Crash as NVIDIA, Intel, and SanDisk Rally after One SpaceX Quote
Elon Musk May Have Ended the October AI Crash as NVIDIA, Intel, and SanDisk Rally after One SpaceX Quote
Joel SouthWed, October 21, 2026 at 3:04 PM UTC
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Musk's SpaceX compute expansion targets sent NVIDIA up 1.82% and Intel up 1.69% in premarket trading, reversing a brutal October slide.
SanDisk surged 3.22% premarket despite falling 21% over the prior month, with no disclosed SpaceX contract driving the move.
Musk said SpaceX ended Q3 with 1.7 gigawatts of compute and he "would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts" by end of 2027.
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Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX), used the company's third-quarter earnings call last night to describe how fast SpaceX is adding AI computing capacity.
Chip stocks bounced in premarket trading. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) rose 1.82% to $220.42. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) gained 1.69% to $93.24, and SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) added 3.22% to $1,409.28. SpaceX rose 8.22%. Strong gains didn't hold past the open, but as of 11 a.m. ET, all three stocks were still in the green.
The quote from Musk comes at an important time as AI infrastructure stocks have been hit hard in October. Over the past month, SanDisk is down 21.35% and Intel is down 14.14%. NVIDIA fell only 0.83%.
What SpaceX Reported Versus What Musk Expects
Reported: Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnson said SpaceX ended Q3 with 1.7 gigawatts of rated compute. Johnson put Q3 capital expenditures (spending on equipment and buildings) at $19.6 billion and guided Q4 to between $35 billion and $40 billion. Management said new compute pays for itself in less than a year at current pricing. A gigawatt of compute measures how much electricity a fleet of AI chips draws. One gigawatt is roughly what a large power plant produces.
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Expected: Elon Musk said SpaceX is on track to bring roughly 200,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra chips online every month for the rest of 2026, keep that pace in 2027, and shift mostly to Vera Rubin next year. Elon Musk said SpaceX should have 2.5 to 3 gigawatts online by year-end. He is fairly confident of adding 10 gigawatts in 2027 and said "I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year." Elon Musk is aiming for 20 gigawatts of new power and cooling, plus a 440,000-chip Vera Rubin training cluster by the end of Q2. He also said SpaceX could rent out its compute "several times over" if it said yes to every request. SpaceX disclosed no purchase orders with any chipmaker.
How Much Each Stock Actually Gains
NVIDIA: This is direct demand evidence. NVIDIA's own release lists "SpaceXAI to deploy NVIDIA Vera CPUs for agentic AI applications" as a growth initiative. Even so, its Q3 guide of $108B ±2% already assumes huge demand, so the comments support that number more than they raise it.
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Intel: The link is indirect. Intel joined Terafab as a strategic partner alongside SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla, and Barron's tied Intel's gain to Musk's Terafab comments.
SanDisk: Every AI server rack needs storage, and Datacenter revenue reached $2.977B last quarter.
Why One Morning Proves Little
Musk himself named power, cooling and electrical equipment as the limiting factors, the same constraint that keeps pulling attention toward the suppliers behind the data centers (we rounded up seven of them, from power to cooling, in a free AI infrastructure report). He also leases compute at "effectively the spot market rate" instead of signing long-term deals, which means that demand is not locked in.
CNBC reported that listed AI cloud providers rose after his comments. Truist called the quarter "the first data point during the earnings season to support the bull case for AI cloud providers". On the same day, Ken Griffin said AI is "almost certainly" in a bubble.
Did Musk Just End the AI Sell-Off?
Not yet. Musk gave the strongest demand signal so far in this earnings season, but these remain unsigned management targets. Musk directly mentioned NVIDIA, so whether Intel and SanDisk rise today are the real test. If both close October 21 above their prior closes of $91.69 and $1,365.38, buyers are treating the comments as real. Negative sentiment has been driving the AI infrastructure trade across October; earnings season could be the catalyst stocks in the space need.
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Source: “AOL Money”
