SpaceX reported $14.6 billion in revenue for the third quarter, with artificial intelligence now accounting for 52% of total income.
The figures come from a regulatory filing released on Tuesday. This shift marks a clear move away from the company’s origins as a space firm toward a focus on computing power.
Super Intelligence segment growth
Revenue growth came from all areas, but the renamed “Super Intelligence” division drove the majority of the increase. This segment generated $7.5 billion through the recently acquired Cursor coding tool, the Grok bot, and the company’s expanding neocloud business. The neocloud currently holds 1.7 GW of compute capacity.
That AI business unit posted $431 million in profit. The figure would have been higher had it not included $1.2 billion in one-time stock-based compensation expenses linked to the Cursor acquisition.
Top-line revenue also received a boost of approximately $1 billion from the recovery of bitcoin prices and unspecified related-party income potentially tied to a SpaceX investment in another entity.
Capital expenditure and infrastructure
Revenue growth is counterbalanced by total capital expenditures of $19.6 billion. SpaceX continues to build a second data centre project, Colossus II, and increase investment in Starship. The heavy-lift rocket is viewed as vital for deploying a new generation of Starlink satellites and developing orbital data centres.
CFO Bret Johnsen stated the company would spend between $35 billion and $40 billion on new capital investments in the fourth quarter.
Musk confirmed he spends four days a week in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of Colossus II, working to bring the data centre online.
“People are starting to realise [that] the constraint on deployment of super intelligence is more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips,” Musk argued.
He said he has tasked a team of SpaceX engineers to solve that problem. “This is a bit like the New York Yankees playing in Little League. It’s not fair, but the net result is being able to deploy power cooling infrastructure at a rate that is vastly faster than anyone else.”
Starship and connectivity
The next test flight of the Starship rocket, expected in November, will see SpaceX attempt to recover both the first stage booster and the second stage. Recovering both segments of the vehicle would be a “massive technology milestone,” Musk said, but the true first would be re-flying both stages.
SpaceX also saw growth in subscribers to its Starlink space internet network, reaching 13.6 million consumers. Musk predicted that the growth of AI agents would lead to more demand for connectivity.
Profitability outlook
In spite of those capital expenditures, the company’s revenue boost was substantial enough to push it back into profitability. SpaceX reported net income of $4.4 billion, a turnaround from the $1 billion loss in the same quarter last year.
It will still have some catching up to do if it wants to remain profitable for the year. In the first nine months of the year, SpaceX still had a net income loss of $413 million.
Future revenue projections
Musk took a particularly bullish stance on the company’s Superintelligence business segment, predicting that SpaceX’s annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027 will be “somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion.”
More concretely, Johnsen forecast total revenue in the range of $33 billion to $37 billion in the first quarter of 2027.
What it means
For the people building software and running businesses, the implication is that the bottleneck for scaling AI is no longer just chip availability. The focus has moved to physical power, cooling, and data centre construction. SpaceX is positioning itself to provide the infrastructure required to run these systems at scale, potentially offering a competitive alternative to existing cloud providers.
