NHS England is giving more than 505,000 clinicians and support staff access to Microsoft 365 Copilot in what will be the largest AI deployment in healthcare globally. The rollout follows a pilot across 90 NHS organisations in which 30,000 workers used the tool for administrative tasks. NHS England says the average participant saved 43 minutes per day, roughly equivalent to five working weeks per year.

The contract is valued at approximately £120 million and covers Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and agent-governance tooling. NHS England plans to onboard 200,000 users within the first six months and the full 505,000 within a year. The subscription includes Copilot Studio, a platform for building AI agents without requiring technical expertise.

“By rolling out Microsoft Copilot across the NHS, we can reduce that burden, free up clinicians’ time and help staff focus on what they do best, caring for patients,” UK Health Innovation and Safety Minister Preet Kaur Gill said. The deployment is framed as part of the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan for England. Rob Thompson, NHS England’s Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer, described the potential to save clinical staff “nearly a day’s worth of admin time every fortnight” as a “gamechanger for patients.”

The administrative burden the rollout aims to address is substantial. A 2026 UK study published in the National Library of Medicine found that resident doctors spend four hours on administrative work for every hour of direct patient contact, with 73% of their time consumed by non-patient-facing tasks. Separately, research from the Health Education and Training Trust found clinicians spend an average of 13.5 hours per week on clinical documentation, a 25% increase over seven years and more than a third of their working hours.

Microsoft identified five job roles set to benefit most: clinical administration, ward clerks, medical secretaries, core services, and management. The tool will handle writing, information retrieval, summarisation, and analysis. NHS England’s internal estimates suggest the 43-minute daily saving could translate to roughly 3,600 full-time-equivalent roles freed for direct patient care once the deployment reaches full scale.

That 43-minute figure, however, has not been independently verified. It comes from NHS England’s own pilot data, and the methodology behind it has not been published. Microsoft’s consumer Copilot terms of service label the product “for entertainment purposes only,“ a clause that applies to consumer products rather than the enterprise M365 tier NHS England is deploying.

The distinction matters, but the broader adoption picture is unflattering. Only 3% of Microsoft’s 450 million M365 enterprise users currently pay for the $30-per-month Copilot add-on, and accuracy surveys have shown negative net promoter scores. Lapsed users have cited distrust of answers as their primary reason for stopping.

Accenture deployed Copilot to all 743,000 employees earlier this year in the largest enterprise rollout to date, reporting 89% monthly active usage among a 200,000-person cohort. But Accenture invested heavily in structured change management, one-on-one training, and internal communities to drive that adoption. NHS England’s ability to replicate that approach across a workforce spanning hundreds of hospitals, clinics, and GP practices, with widely varying levels of digital literacy, is an open question.

Staff training and governance are acknowledged risks. NHS England has committed to an “extensive training and adoption programme,” and experience from Welsh councils running a similar Microsoft 365 rollout suggests that internal AI champions, practitioners teaching other practitioners, are critical to uptake. The NHS will need to get its governance, data protection policies, and usage strategies in place before the tool can deliver its promised value at scale.

For Microsoft, the NHS deal is commercially significant. At an estimated £120 million, it is one of the largest single Copilot contracts in the public sector and provides the company with a flagship healthcare reference at a time when enterprise AI adoption has lagged projections. “Bringing AI safely into the flow of healthcare will help ease pressures, improve productivity, and support better decision-making across the health service,” Microsoft UK and Ireland CEO Darren Hardman said.

The deployment is a bet that an AI tool with a mixed enterprise track record can deliver measurable results in one of the world’s largest and most complex public healthcare systems. If the 43-minute daily saving holds at scale, the NHS will have demonstrated a use case that every national health service in Europe will want to study. If adoption stalls, staff resist, or the time savings prove overstated, it will be £120 million of public money spent on a product whose own maker struggled to sell to the private sector.

TL;DR

SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each for a $1.77 trillion valuation. Japanese retail investors bought $2.2 billion of the offering through Mizuho, Rakuten, and SBI.

SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX after raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering ever completed. The previous record holder, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, raised $29.4 billion, making SpaceX’s offering roughly 2.5 times larger.

A regulatory filing on Friday confirmed that Japanese investors accounted for $2.2 billion of the total, purchasing 16.3 million Class A shares, or about 3% of the offering. Japan was one of a handful of countries outside the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, and parts of Europe, where retail buyers had direct access to the shares.

How the Japan tranche worked

Mizuho Financial Group’s US investment banking unit is one of 23 underwriters on the deal. It ran the Japanese allocation through its local brokerage and two online platforms, Rakuten Securities and SBI Securities.

SpaceX initially targeted $2 billion from Japanese investors but raised the ceiling to $2.5 billion after demand surged. The final $2.2 billion makes it the largest first-time share sale in Japan since JX Advanced Metals’ IPO last year.

The global picture

Total investor demand reached approximately $250 billion, making the offering nearly four times oversubscribed. BlackRock alone reportedly placed a $5 billion order. Goldman Sachs led the 23-bank underwriting syndicate, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase among the book-running managers.

At the $135 per share price, SpaceX’s fully diluted valuation sits at approximately $1.77 trillion, making it the seventh-largest listed company in the United States, above Tesla’s market capitalisation of roughly $1.6 trillion. If underwriters exercise the full over-allotment option, total proceeds could reach $86.25 billion.

What SpaceX actually is now

SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company. After absorbing Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI in an all-stock transaction in February 2026, it became a conglomerate spanning reusable rockets, satellite internet, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Its S-1 filing disclosed $18 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025, alongside a net loss of $4.9 billion. Starlink, the satellite internet division, generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating profit, accounting for 61% of total sales and all of the company’s profitability. The xAI segment recorded a $6.35 billion operating loss.

Musk’s grip on voting power

Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity but controls roughly 82% of its votes through a dual-class share structure in which his Class B shares carry disproportionate voting rights. That gives him unilateral authority to elect or remove a majority of the board.

The S-1 prospectus lists 849.5 million Class A shares and 5.57 billion Class B shares, a structure that ensures public shareholders have minimal governance influence regardless of their economic stake.

Who gets rich

The IPO is expected to mint roughly 4,000 millionaires among SpaceX’s workforce, including engineers, cooks, and administrative staff who received equity as part of their compensation. SpaceX set aside up to 5% of shares for employees and their associates.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX spent two decades as a private company, funding its operations through government contracts, private equity rounds, and Starlink revenue. The IPO marks the first time ordinary investors can buy shares directly.

The flags

SpaceX is unprofitable on a GAAP basis, with the xAI segment responsible for the $4.9 billion net loss. Whether Starlink’s profits can scale fast enough to offset xAI’s capital consumption is unresolved.

Musk’s 82% voting control means public shareholders are effectively along for the ride on all strategic decisions, including future acquisitions and capital allocation. The $1.77 trillion valuation implies growth rates no company has ever sustained at this scale, as Fortune has noted, and the xAI integration adds execution risk that did not exist when SpaceX was purely a launch and satellite business.

For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday.

SpaceX priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in an update on its website. That makes SpaceX officially the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funds raised by Saudi Aramco during its 2019 public markets debut. At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

The company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., will trade under the SPCX ticker symbol.

As active trading gets underway tomorrow, SpaceX’s share price may sink or rise. But anecdotal reports suggest that big institutional investors and individual buyers are lining up to purchase shares in the 24-year-old technology company.

If the sale is as oversubscribed as the talkative bankers make it out to be, they have an option to bring an additional 83.3 million shares to market, which would raise another $11 billion at the company’s opening price.

Hyperliquid, a crypto betting market that attempts to offer synthetic exposure to SpaceX stock, currently prices the shares at $167, suggesting that market participants expect a classic 20% IPO pop on the first day of trading.

In the longer term, there are big open questions about how SpaceX will be able to justify its eye-popping valuation. The company’s outstanding engineering projects, from the world’s largest reusable rocket to a new American chip fab, fill up a daunting to-do list.

This story is developing …