SpaceX has more neocloud revenue
The Verge Elizabeth Lopatto
SpaceX's AI arm just tripled its revenue to $2.6 billion, mostly by renting out compute to other AI firms. That puts Elon's rocket company in the same ring as neoclouds like CoreWeave — a weird flex, but a real one.
SpaceX doesn't just launch rockets anymore — apparently it rents out GPUs too. The company's latest quarterly numbers show AI revenue jumping more than threefold year over year, hitting $2.6 billion. That's not pocket change, and it's not coming from Starlink or Falcon 9 payloads. It's coming from compute deals.
The company struck agreements with Anthropic in May and Google in June to supply processing power, effectively turning SpaceX into a neocloud provider alongside outfits like CoreWeave that exist purely to sell AI infrastructure. For a company built on rockets and satellites, that's a strange pivot to watch unfold in the earnings sheet, but SpaceX itself flagged AI as the biggest driver of its valuation in documents tied to a potential public listing.
The division isn't profitable yet. It lost $1.5 billion this quarter, a slight improvement from the same period last year, but still a massive number for a business segment that didn't exist in its current form a few years ago. Growth at this pace tends to come with growth in spending too, and SpaceX says its AI ambitions are pushing costs higher across the board — new hardware, new data infrastructure, the usual burn that comes with chasing compute demand nobody can fully predict yet.
What's notable here isn't just the revenue jump. It's who's buying. Anthropic and Google aren't small partners looking for spare capacity — they're two of the most compute-hungry AI labs on the planet, and they're now leaning on SpaceX's infrastructure the same way they might lean on a dedicated cloud vendor. That's a signal the AI compute crunch is serious enough that even a rocket company can find a lucrative side hustle filling in the gaps.
My take
Everyone obsessing over which AI lab has the smartest model is missing the actual bottleneck: nobody has enough compute, and companies with spare infrastructure are cashing in regardless of their original business. SpaceX renting out chips to Anthropic and Google says more about the compute shortage than any benchmark chart does, and expect more non-cloud companies to quietly become neoclouds before this cycle cools off.
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