SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company. The company reported $14.6 billion in third-quarter revenue on Tuesday, with its “Super Intelligence” AI business line now generating 52% of total income — and it was more profitable than investors expected.
SpaceX (Credits: TechCrunch)
The renamed Super Intelligence segment pulled in $7.5 billion in revenue from the recently acquired Cursor coding tool, the Grok bot, and — most importantly — a booming neocloud business that now commands 1.7 GW of compute. The AI unit generated $431 million in profit, a figure that would have been higher without $1.2 billion in one-time stock-based compensation tied to the Cursor acquisition.
Musk’s Boldest Prediction Yet
CEO Elon Musk took an aggressively bullish stance on the segment, predicting SpaceX’s annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027 would land “somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion.” More concretely, CFO Bret Johnsen forecast first-quarter 2027 revenue in the range of $33 billion to $37 billion.
On the capex side, the company spent $19.6 billion in the quarter, building out the second data center project, Colossus II in Memphis, Tennessee — where Musk says he’s spending four days a week — and ramping investment in Starship. Johnsen said Q4 capital investment would run $35–40 billion.
“People are starting to realize [that] the constraint on deployment of super intelligence is more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips,” Musk argued during a livestreamed investor discussion. “This is a bit like the New York Yankees playing in Little League. It’s not fair.” He even noted SpaceX is using its metal casting capabilities — developed for rockets — to bypass 12- to 18-month turbine manufacturing delays.
Back To Profitability
The revenue surge pushed SpaceX back into the black: net income of $4.4 billion, a sharp turnaround from the $1 billion loss in the same quarter last year — though the company still carries a $413 million net loss for the first nine months of the year.
Elsewhere, Starlink grew to 13.6 million subscribers, with Musk predicting AI agents will drive even more demand for connectivity. And the next Starship test flight in November will attempt to recover both the booster and the second stage — with the real milestone being reflying both.
Also Read: Anthropic’s Cloud Partnerships Are Getting Messy As AWS, Google And Microsoft See It As A Rival | OpenAI Acquires Orchestra Bio to Beef Up Its Biotech Business
Source: TechCrunch — read the full story there.