SpaceX’s AI boom delivers profit—but its spending spree is just beginning
SpaceX’s AI boom delivers profit—but its spending spree is just beginning
On Tuesday, SpaceX reported a third-quarter revenue surge of 161% to $14.6 billion and net income of $4.4 billion, reversing losses reported in the prior quarter and a year earlier. The breakout business was its renamed “Super Intelligence” unit, whose $7.56 billion in revenue nearly tripled from the second quarter and overtook Starlink connectivity revenue of $5.25 billion.
The result gave Musk fresh ammunition for an extraordinary growth forecast. After the report, he wrote on X that “$1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible.” The company’s operating story is no longer solely about launches and satellite broadband: it is leasing computing capacity to companies including Anthropic and Google while building its own AI products.
But Wednesday’s investor discussion made clear that the next phase will be expensive. SpaceX said total quarterly capital expenditure reached $19.6 billion, including $16.4 billion related to AI, and CFO Bret Johnsen forecast $35 billion to $40 billion in spending in the current quarter as new compute comes online. He argued that, at current pricing, new deployments can achieve “a payback of less than a year.”
Musk’s diagnosis of the bottleneck was equally revealing. Chips are no longer the main constraint, he said; power, cooling and physical infrastructure are. SpaceX is leaning on its engineering and metal-casting capabilities to speed up data-center construction and turbine procurement, while Musk says he is spending much of each week in Memphis working on the Colossus II project.
That leaves investors with two competing signals. The AI unit has delivered the scale and profitability SpaceX promised, while Starlink continues to grow. Yet the company still recorded a $413 million net loss across the first nine months of the year, making its vast infrastructure bill—and its ability to monetize it quickly—the central test of the bull case.
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