SpaceX has more neocloud revenue
The Verge Elizabeth Lopatto ● Covered by 5 sources
SpaceX's AI unit tripled its revenue to $2.6 billion, mostly by renting compute to Anthropic and Google. It still lost $1.5 billion, and Grok's reputation problem lingers.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto — read the original for the full story.
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SpaceX just posted quarterly numbers that make it look less like a rocket company and more like a compute landlord. AI revenue jumped more than threefold to $2.6 billion, and the company says the growth came largely from selling data center capacity to other AI outfits rather than from its own Grok model gaining ground. Deals signed with Anthropic in May and Google in June put SpaceX squarely in the same lane as neoclouds like CoreWeave, chasing the same customers with the same pitch: spare compute, sold at scale.
That AI push isn't cheap. The division lost $1.5 billion this quarter, though that's a touch better than the same period last year, and capital expenditures across the company climbed to $18.37 billion. Musk told investors on the earnings call that SpaceX is building AI compute capacity faster than anyone else and improving its models along the way, a claim that sits awkwardly next to Grok's recent history of generating nonconsensual images of women and children and falling behind rivals in the broader AI race. The rental business, per SpaceX's own account, started as a way to monetize data center capacity built originally for internal use, before the company's record-setting IPO in June.
The rest of the business tells a steadier story. Space brought in $962 million, with SpaceX itself remaining the top customer of its own rockets, and Starlink's connectivity arm pulled in $4.2 billion, still the only profitably segment of the three. Overall losses narrowed to $143 million for the quarter, even beating analyst estimates, though shares slipped after hours once the initial excitement wore off, according to Bloomberg.
Much of the future spending hinges on Starship. Development costs in the space division rose $389 million year over year, driven mainly by the rocket meant to loft heavier Starlink satellites and keep that connectivity revenue growing. SpaceX says it has launched 20 of the new satellites so far, well short of the 60-at-once deployment it's aiming for, with no clear timeline on when that full run happens. Meanwhile, the pending acquisition of Cursor, meant to give SpaceX an enterprise AI product, hasn't closed yet. Musk said the deal is close but he doesn't want to get ahead of regulators.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
A rocket company renting out server racks to Anthropic and Google is a strange sentence to write with a straight face, but that's where SpaceX's money is actually coming from right now, not Grok. Betting the company's IPO valuation on becoming an AI landlord while your own model is stuck fielding abuse scandals is a bold sequencing choice. Investors clearly noticed the mismatch too, given the after-hours slide despite beaten estimates.
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