SpaceX’s A.I. Unit Overtakes Starlink as Quarterly Profit Hits $4.4 Billion

Set Trending Topics as a preferred source on Google.

Rockets and satellites still matter, but today SpaceX makes most of its money from data centers: Elon Musk’s company has just reported a quarterly profit of $4.4 billion (about €3.9 billion). For the first time, its A.I. unit brings in more revenue than Starlink, mainly because SpaceX rents out computing capacity to A.I. companies such as Anthropic.

The Numbers at a Glance

On Tuesday, SpaceX released its third-quarter results, its second set of earnings since its record-breaking initial public offering in June. Revenue rose 161 percent from a year earlier to $14.6 billion (about €13 billion), while analysts had expected just under $12.9 billion. After losses in the previous quarter and in the same quarter a year earlier, the company booked a profit of $4.4 billion this time, with operating income of $2.8 billion.

The three segments in detail:

• Super Intelligence: $7.6 billion in revenue, up from $813 million a year earlier, including about $608 million from the acquired coding start-up Cursor. The unit posted its first operating profit, $431 million.
• Connectivity: The Starlink business grew 69 percent to $5.2 billion and earned $2.4 billion in operating income. With 1.6 million new customers, bringing the total to 13.6 million, SpaceX fell short of analysts’ expectations, however.
• Space: The rocket business grew 6 percent to $1.8 billion, with 35 launches in the quarter.

For the first quarter of 2027, SpaceX is already projecting revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion, more than double the current figure. In after-hours trading, the stock rose about 1.5 percent to around $150, just above its I.P.O. price of $135.

Anthropic as a Major Tenant

The A.I. unit, which SpaceX now calls “Super Intelligence,” grew out of the acquisition of Mr. Musk’s A.I. company xAI in February. Besides serving its own chatbot Grok and the X platform, it rents computing capacity to A.I. companies such as Google and Anthropic. The maker of Claude leases the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis. The original agreement called for $1.25 billion a month through 2029; according to an Anthropic prospectus viewed by Reuters, the commitment has since grown to as much as $84.5 billion (about €75 billion).

SpaceX plans to keep expanding. At the end of September, its computing capacity stood at 1.7 gigawatts, and it aims to reach 2.5 to 3 gigawatts by the end of the year. Mr. Musk expects computing power to remain scarce for a long time, with power, cooling and infrastructure as the main bottlenecks.

Competition in the Data Center Business

By renting out A.I. computing power, SpaceX competes with the big cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle. There are also specialized providers such as CoreWeave and the British operator Nscale, which is itself negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with Anthropic. In satellite internet, Amazon’s Kuiper is Starlink’s biggest rival but still lags far behind.

The Flip Side

The growth comes at a high price. In the third quarter alone, SpaceX invested $19.6 billion, mainly in data centers, Starship and satellites. It plans to spend $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter, and it recently emerged that SpaceX wants to borrow $40 billion for Nvidia chips. According to Fortune, analysts at Visible Alpha expect its debt to rise from $50.7 billion in 2025 to $350 billion in 2029.

Then there is the dependence on a few large customers: Most of SpaceX’s lease agreements can be terminated with 90 days’ notice. If a tenant like Anthropic walks away, a large share of A.I. revenue would disappear, while the investments in chips and buildings would remain.