SpaceX now earns more from AI compute than from Starlink
The AI division brought in $7.56bn of revenue in the third quarter and invested more than twice that.
According to its quarterly filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX's Super Intelligence division generated $7.56bn of revenue in the third quarter, more than Starlink's $5.25bn. Over the same period the division invested $16.4bn, on an operating profit of $431m.
What happened
Revenue at the AI division rose roughly ninefold within a year, from $813m to $7.56bn. Just over $600m came from Cursor, the coding platform acquired in August; most of the rest came from renting compute to third parties. The filing refers only generally to cloud contracts with external customers. Media reports name Anthropic and Google; SpaceX confirms no names. Installed capacity reportedly stood at 1.7 gigawatts, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier.
The ratio of revenue to capital spending is revealing. Each dollar of revenue in the AI division came with just over two dollars of investment, adding up to about $40bn over nine months. Starlink still makes the money: the Connectivity division delivered $2.37bn of the group's $2.79bn operating profit. In effect, a satellite network is funding the build-out of a data-centre business. Group revenue rose 161% to $14.6bn, more than half of it now from the AI division.
What follows
SpaceX is becoming another large supplier in the market for rented AI compute, so far dominated by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle and specialist providers. More supply is likely to increase price pressure on compute hours once the announced capacity actually comes online. Model developers gain negotiating power and become less dependent on individual cloud providers. For the providers themselves, the key question is whether margins can carry the depreciation of short-lived chips. Management guided to capital spending of $35bn to $40bn for the fourth quarter. Whether utilisation keeps pace is open. European companies buying AI capacity gain options, but also another US supplier with its own interests.
What to watch
- Order backlog of $63bn according to management, about $42bn of it due within a year, relative to investment
- Operating margin of the AI division excluding one-off effects from the Cursor acquisition
- Prices for rented GPU hours at the large cloud providers in the first half of 2027
Sources
- SEC: Space Exploration Technologies, Ergebnisse Q3 2026
- TIKR: SpaceX Q3 Earnings – AI now brings in half the revenue
- 24/7 Wall St.: SpaceX's AI Business Is Now Bigger Than Starlink