AI Tech / news
SpaceX Posts $4.4B Quarterly Profit as AI Drives 52% of Revenue
SpaceX swung to profitability in the third quarter with net income of $4.4 billion on revenue of $14.6 billion, powered by data centers and Grok agents that outperformed investor expectations. Artificial intelligence now accounts for 52% of the company's income.
The results, disclosed in a regulatory filing, show growth across every segment of Elon Musk's deep tech conglomerate, but the sharpest expansion came from the business line now called "Super Intelligence." That unit generated $7.5 billion in revenue, drawing on the recently acquired Cursor coding tool, the Grok bot and, most significantly, a neocloud operation that now carries 1.7 GW of compute.
The AI business delivered $431 million in profit. That figure would have been higher were it not for $1.2 billion in one-time stock-based compensation expenses tied to the Cursor acquisition.
Top-line revenue also received a lift of roughly $1 billion from the recovery in Bitcoin prices and unspecified related-party income that may be connected to a SpaceX investment in another company.
Those gains are set against total capital expenditures of $19.6 billion, as SpaceX continues building out a second data center project, Colossus II, and raises spending on Starship, the heavy-lift rocket it sees as central to deploying a new generation of Starlink satellites and developing orbital data centers.
The quarter marks a further shift away from the company's origins as a space venture, with AI now contributing more than half of its income.