Investing.com -- Morgan Stanley argues that SpaceX's planned $100 billion Starbase facility in Louisiana's Vermilion Parish represents a strategic milestone that the market has yet to price into shares of SPCX.

Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley's lead aerospace analyst, framed the announcement bluntly: "We do not believe investors appreciate the scale of what SpaceX is planning with Starship."

The Louisiana complex will feature up to 10 launch pads across five launch complexes, with construction scheduled to begin in 2027 and first launches targeted for 2029. The site sits on former ExxonMobil property and is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs. Louisiana's position as the third-largest natural gas producer in the United States was a key site-selection factor, Jonas noted, given that each Starship launch consumes more than 1,000 tons of liquid methane.

Morgan Stanley values SPCX at $137, calling it attractive on 10x sales and 25x EBIT against its FY28 forecasts that embed 70% revenue growth and 113% EBIT growth, respectively, according to the firm's estimates.

Critically, Jonas argues the Louisiana facility is not even required to hit Morgan Stanley's already-ambitious long-term projections. The firm's 2040 SpaceX revenue forecast of $3.5 trillion, per its own modeling, requires just eight Starship pads running two launches per day. With 15 pads now identifiable across Texas, Florida, and Louisiana, the capacity Morgan Stanley can map out meaningfully exceeds what its base case demands.

The more consequential angle, in Morgan Stanley's view, is what the launch infrastructure enables for orbital compute. The firm projects that orbital compute will account for more than 80% of SpaceX's launch revenues beginning in 2032, a figure that dwarfs traditional satellite deployment and resupply missions. Jonas estimates that each incremental 1GW of nameplate compute capacity, assuming $50 per watt and 70% incremental margins capitalized at 10x EBITDA, would add $27 to the SPCX share price, roughly 20% of the current level. Morgan Stanley's own year-end FY27 compute estimate stands at 4.9GW, well below SpaceX's internal target of closer to 10GW — meaning the upside scenario, if SpaceX executes, could be substantially larger than the base case.

At $137, Jonas writes, "the implied multiple of the Enterprise AI business is in the very low single-digits with essentially $0 embedded for the orbital AI call-option." That framing positions SPCX as a potential AI infrastructure play trading near its IPO price with improving fundamental momentum, in Morgan Stanley's assessment. Jonas wrote that "investors have a unique opportunity to 'revisit' SPCX stock right on top of the IPO price with arguably even greater momentum in fundamentals across Space, Connectivity and Enterprise AI, a decidedly more bullish outlook following 2Q results and greater 'information discovery' that the share unlocks have (to date) not weighed on the stock as feared."

The $100 billion headline figure requires context. Morgan Stanley notes the sum is cumulative over a decade and equals essentially all of its modeled SpaceX space capex for 2026 through 2035. Yet when AI infrastructure spending is included in the full capital plan, the Louisiana facility represents just 2% of total projected capex over that horizon, per the firm's estimates. To fund the broader program, Morgan Stanley models roughly $80 billion per year in average net debt issuance.

Jonas is not dismissive of the execution risk. "Large capex numbers are easy to announce on paper, but the growth needs to materialize for SpaceX and the debt markets to continue to justify it," he wrote. He also flagged the geopolitical and regulatory backdrop as a tailwind for geographic diversification: bipartisan resistance to data center expansion, including pushback seen in Texas, gives SpaceX a structural reason to spread its launch footprint across jurisdictions.

Looking ahead, two milestones will test Morgan Stanley's thesis more directly than the Louisiana announcement itself. SpaceX's FY27 AI compute trajectory will be a key signal: if the company moves meaningfully toward its 10GW internal target from Morgan Stanley's 4.9GW base estimate, each gigawatt of upside translates, on the firm's math, to roughly $27 in additional stock value. Construction commencement in 2027 will also give investors the first concrete evidence of whether the $100 billion commitment is proceeding on schedule. Any slip in that timeline, or signs of stress in SpaceX's debt financing capacity, would be the clearest early test of Jonas's caution that announced capex and realized growth are not the same thing.