SpaceX reports its AI business is now its largest by revenue

SpaceX reported third-quarter results on 20 October in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Its “Super Intelligence” (SI) segment, which covers the xAI models and applications, the Cursor coding tool and an advertising line, earned $7.56bn in revenue. That was more than Connectivity, the Starlink segment, at $5.25bn, and Space, at $1.77bn. Group revenue was $14.6bn, up 161% on a year earlier.

SI revenue was $2.56bn in the previous quarter and $813m a year earlier. The company attributed the rise to the start of new cloud-services agreements, the acquisition of Cursor, and wider use of Grok by enterprises and consumers. The release did not name the cloud customers or split the figure by source, beyond reporting $538m of advertising revenue and $7.02bn of “solutions and infrastructure” revenue. SpaceX had earlier agreed to supply compute to Anthropic. Cursor, whose acquisition closed on 14 August at an implied equity value of $60bn, contributed $608m between closing and 30 September. The release also introduced Grok Bot, described as an always-on agentic system.

The segment’s profit came with heavy spending. SI income from operations was $431m after $1.2bn of share-based compensation tied to the Cursor deal, against a loss of $1.26bn the quarter before. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, was $4.95bn. SI capital expenditure was $16.4bn in the quarter and about $40bn for the nine months. Nameplate compute reached 1.7 gigawatts at 30 September, from 1.4 at 30 June and 0.6 a year earlier, as the Colossus II build-out continued. Group net income was $4.4bn.

On the earnings call, Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, said that independent directors on each company’s board had formed special committees to review a possible merger, TechCrunch reported. He said shareholders had asked for the review, that he is conflicted and takes no part in the committees’ talks, and that no terms had been agreed. He added that he supported the idea and saw “a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity”. Musk did not name the committee members. TechCrunch noted that a merger would need approval from a majority of all Tesla shareholders, not only those voting, whereas Musk’s voting power in SpaceX exceeds 50%.

SI revenue exceeded Connectivity and Space combined, which came to $7.0bn. Because the filing does not divide the “solutions and infrastructure” line between cloud contracts, Cursor and Grok, how much of the total comes from models and applications, as opposed to selling compute, cannot be read from it.