While many retail investors got allocations of Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) when the stock IPO’d, others were left out. However, if you missed the IPO, I wouldn’t be chasing the stock, as I think there are better companies to buy pursuing similar objectives.

SpaceX, as it is better known, operates three primary businesses. The first is its reusable rocket business, but this isn’t why the company closed its first day of trading with a $2.1 trillion market cap. This is a solid business, but it’s more of a launching pad (pun intended) for its other businesses. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service is its profit center. Once again, this is a nice business, but certainly not a trillion-dollar one.

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The company’s biggest opportunity is its artificial intelligence (AI) business, which it views as having a total addressable market of $26.5 trillion. Through its earlier acquisition of another Elon Musk-backed company, xAI, SpaceX acquired a large hyperscale operation and the Grok large language model (LLM). The big ambition for this business is to eventually build data centers in space, which could be powered by solar power from near-constant sunlight. However, there are technical issues to overcome, including cooling the infrastructure in the vacuum of space, the finite usefulness of chips, and protecting them from cosmic radiation, which can corrupt data.

Right now, SpaceX stock is valued mostly on the hope and dreams of a CEO with a very mixed track record of delivering on his promises, including timelines for autonomous driving and a large hyperloop system. As such, I think there are better stocks to buy.

1. Amazon

If you’re looking for a hyperscaler with space ambitions, look no further than Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). The company is the largest cloud computing provider in the world and is seeing strong acceleration in revenue growth in this business. It also has an established custom chip business, including its Trainium AI accelerators and Graviton central processing units (CPUs), that help give it a cost advantage.

At the same time, Amazon is building a satellite internet service called Amazon Leo to compete with Starlink. While SpaceX does have an advantage with its own rocket operations, and Amazon saw a setback with the Blue Origin explosion, it’s notable that no one was hurt, and none of its satellites were damaged. It’s also contracted with multiple providers, and its strategy remains unchanged. Meanwhile, its recent acquisition of Globalstar will bring it important spectrum, device-to-device capabilities, and a close partnership with Apple.