SpaceX’s A.I. Unit Overtakes Starlink as Quarterly Profit Hits $4.4 Billion

SpaceX still launches rockets and runs satellites, but the company’s biggest money maker now sits in data centers. In its third-quarter results, released Tuesday, it reported a profit of $4.4 billion, with revenue up 161% from a year earlier to $14.6 billion. Analysts had expected just under $12.9 billion. Operating income came in at $2.8 billion.

The sharpest change is inside what SpaceX now calls “Super Intelligence.” That unit brought in $7.6 billion, up from $813 million a year earlier, and for the first time it out-earned Starlink. Some of that revenue came from the acquired coding startup Cursor, which accounted for about $608 million. The unit also posted its first operating profit, at $431 million.

Starlink was still growing. Connectivity revenue rose 69% to $5.2 billion, with $2.4 billion in operating income. SpaceX said it added 1.6 million customers, bringing the total to 13.6 million, though that was still below analyst expectations. The rocket business, meanwhile, grew 6% to $1.8 billion on 35 launches.

The A.I. side is not just feeding SpaceX’s own chatbot Grok and the X platform. It also rents computing capacity to outside A.I. companies, including Google and Anthropic. Anthropic leases the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis, and a prospectus viewed by Reuters showed the contract value had grown from the original $1.25 billion a month through 2029 to as much as $84.5 billion.

The scale is rising fast, and so is the bill. SpaceX invested $19.6 billion in the third quarter alone, mostly in data centers, Starship and satellites. It plans to spend $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter, and it recently emerged that the company wants to borrow $40 billion for Nvidia chips. By the end of September, its computing capacity stood at 1.7 gigawatts, with a target of 2.5 to 3 gigawatts by year-end.