SpaceX’s AI business is beating expectations

SpaceX’s data centers and Grok agents have been more profitable than investors expected in second quarter of the year, as the company leaves its roots as a space company behind to focus on artificial intelligence, which now makes up 52% of its income.

Elon Musk’s deep conglomerate reported on Tuesday $14.6 billion in third-quarter revenue, according to its regulatory filing. That number was driven by growth in all segments, but especially it’s renamed “Super Intelligence” business line, which includes the recently-acquired Cursor coding tool, Grok bot, and most importantly, the company’s burgeoning neocloud business, which now boasts 1.7 GW of compute.

That number was also boosted by about $1 billion in income related to the recovery of bitcoin prices and an unspecified related-party income that might be attributed to a SpaceX investment in another company.

The growing revenue is balanced against total capital expenditures of $19.6 billion, as SpaceX continues to build out a second data center project, Colossus II, and increase investment in Starship, the heavy lift rocket it sees as vital to deploying a new generation of Starlink satellites and developing orbital data centers.

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 if it wants to remain profitable for the year, however. In the first nine months of the year, SpaceX still had a net income loss of $413 million.

CEO Elon 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.”

This is a developing story. TechCrunch will update.

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Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing [email protected] or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.