SpaceX’s AI business is beating expectations
TechCrunch Tim Fernholz, Kirsten Korosec ● Covered by 2 sources
SpaceX says its AI work is now 52% of income and helped it swing back to profit. Musk is betting the bottleneck isn’t chips, it’s power, cooling, and data centers.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Tim Fernholz, Kirsten Korosec — read the original for the full story.
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SpaceX’s AI push is no longer a side project. In its latest filing, the company said artificial intelligence now makes up 52% of income, and that growth helped drive a $14.6 billion revenue quarter.
The big engine here is the renamed “Super Intelligence” business line, which now includes the recently acquired Cursor coding tool, the Grok bot, and a fast-growing neocloud business with 1.7 GW of compute. That mix, plus growth across the rest of the company, helped lift the top line.
There were other boosts too. About $1 billion came from the recovery of bitcoin prices, alongside unspecified related-party income that may be tied to a SpaceX investment in another company. But the real story is how much cash is still being poured into infrastructure.
Capital expenditures reached $19.6 billion as SpaceX keeps building Colossus II and puts more money into Starship, the heavy-lift rocket it sees as key to newer Starlink satellites and orbital data centers. Musk said he has been spending four days a week in Memphis working on Colossus II, and argued that superintelligence is constrained more by power and cooling than by chips.
Even with that spending, the company returned to profit. SpaceX reported $4.4 billion in net income, a sharp turn from a $1 billion loss in the same quarter last year. The catch is that the year is still in the red so far: in the first nine months, SpaceX reported a $413 million net loss. Musk, meanwhile, is already talking much bigger, saying annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027 could land somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the usual Musk move: rename the thing, throw hardware at it, and call the bottleneck “infrastructure” like that makes the bill smaller. The market keeps acting surprised that AI is really a power-and-cooling business with a software wrapper. It’s a neat trick until the capex tab shows up, which it always does.
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