Investors bought SpaceX for the rockets. They’re getting an AI cloud.
The company’s AI segment, freshly renamed “Super Intelligence,” brought in $7.6 billion in the third quarter, SpaceX (SPCX) reported Tuesday. That’s more than Starlink and the rocket business combined, and more than half of SpaceX’s $14.6 billion in total revenue.
A year ago, AI made up about 15% of sales. In SpaceX’s first report as a public company, it was a third. One quarter later, Starlink lost its top spot.
So what is Super Intelligence, exactly? Mostly a landlord. About $7 billion came from renting out computing power and selling AI software like Grok. Ads on X, the platform Musk bought for $44 billion, chipped in just over half a billion.
The coding startup Cursor, acquired in August, added $608 million. Even without it, Super Intelligence would have topped Starlink, according to Yahoo Finance calculations.
And the AI business is finally making money. It posted its first quarterly operating profit, $431 million, even after absorbing $1.2 billion in Cursor-related stock compensation. By adjusted EBITDA, a profit measure that skips non-cash charges, it out-earned Starlink.
SpaceX credited “a clear inflection in our Super Intelligence business” in its earnings release.
Starlink isn’t exactly limping, either. It added 1.6 million consumer subscribers in the quarter.
Of course, becoming an AI company isn’t cheap. SpaceX spent $19.6 billion on capital expenditures in the quarter, and 84% of it went to Super Intelligence.
Notice the gap between the bars is shrinking. In the second quarter, SpaceX spent more than twice what it brought in. This time, spending topped revenue by about $5 billion, roughly half the prior shortfall.
The bill still shows up on the balance sheet. Debt, including finance leases, has climbed to nearly $39 billion from about $23 billion at the start of the year. Bond traders have noticed. The cost of insuring SpaceX’s debt with credit default swaps hit a record this week, part of a broader AI credit scare that has hit names like CoreWeave (CRWV) even harder.
Musk isn’t easing off. SpaceX ended the quarter with 1.7 gigawatts of computing capacity, and on the earnings call, he said he “would be surprised” if the company brought “less than 13 gigawatts of compute” online by the end of next year. That’s more than seven times its current capacity, according to Yahoo Finance calculations.
He wants SpaceX running at a $100 billion annual revenue pace by year-end. It’s at about $58 billion now, so December would have to look like a different company. Then again, so did this quarter.