Markets & Business
SpaceX's AI business tops expectations as it reports $14.6B in Q3 revenue
SpaceX reported $14.6 billion in third-quarter revenue and swung to a $4.4 billion profit, as AI — now 52% of its income — drove growth alongside its space business.
A regulatory filing released Tuesday puts SpaceX’s third-quarter revenue at $14.6 billion, with artificial intelligence now accounting for 52% of the company’s income as Elon Musk’s conglomerate pivots further from its roots as a rocket company. Growth came across every segment, but especially the renamed “Super Intelligence” line, which brought in $7.5 billion sourced from the just-acquired Cursor coding tool, the Grok chatbot, and a growing neocloud business that now runs 1.7 gigawatts of compute. The AI segment posted $431 million in profit, though that figure was depressed by $1.2 billion in one-time, Cursor-related stock-based compensation costs. Revenue was also lifted by about $1 billion from the recovery in Bitcoin prices, plus unspecified related-party income that may stem from a SpaceX investment in another company.
That growth came against $19.6 billion in total capital expenditures, as SpaceX keeps expanding its second data-center site, Colossus II, and investing further in the Starship rocket, which it considers central to launching new Starlink satellites and future orbital data centers. CFO Bret Johnsen said the company expects to spend $35 billion to $40 billion on capital investments in the fourth quarter. Musk told investors he’s now spending four days each week in Memphis, Tennessee — home to Colossus II — working to bring the project online, and argued that power, cooling, and infrastructure — not chips — are now the binding constraint on deploying AI compute.
The capital spending was outweighed by the revenue jump: SpaceX swung to a $4.4 billion net income, a sharp reversal from the roughly $1 billion it lost in the equivalent quarter a year earlier, though the company is still working off a $413 million net loss for the first nine months of the year. Starlink subscribers grew to 13.6 million. Musk projected the Super Intelligence business could generate annual recurring revenue of “somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion” by the end of 2027; Johnsen’s own forecast calls for first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion.
Why it matters
A rocket company now drawing more than half its income from AI compute and chatbots shows how aggressively capital is being redirected toward AI infrastructure — and how much SpaceX’s near-term profitability still depends on one-time, non-operating gains.