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- SpaceX's earnings reveal growing capex as well as AI revenue that surpassed its Starlink business for the first time.
- The company reported overall capex spending in line with estimates.
- AI-related spending was slightly less than expected but still more than previous quarters.
SpaceX's second-ever earnings report revealed it's spending more than ever on AI.
SpaceX reported spending $16.4 billion on AI-related capex in the third quarter, continuing the acceleration of AI spending seen in recent quarters.
SpaceX spent roughly $19.6 million on overall capital expenditures in the third quarter as Grok maker continues its AI buildout. That was squarely in line with what Wall Street analysts were expecting.
Of that $19.6 billion, SpaceX reported spending $16.4 billion on AI-related capex. Analysts were expecting $16.9 billion.
SpaceX's stock was trading up 4% after hours following the results.
During the earnings call, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that chips are no longer the biggest constraint to AI buildout.
"So talking about SpaceX superintelligence, SpaceXSI — "sexy," whatever — so as I think people are starting to realize the constraints on deployment of superintelligence is more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips," he said.
SpaceX's AI revenue grew significantly quarter-over-quarter to $7.6 billion — ahead of analysts' estimates of $6.3 billion. This report also marks the first quarter since SpaceX purchased Cursor.
That revenue means that SpaceX's AI segment officially brought in more revenue than its Starlink business. Starlink brought in $5.2 billion for the quarter.
In August, SpaceX's first-ever earnings report appeared to unnerve investors when the Elon Musk-led company disclosed that it had spent $18.4 billion in total capex, with 80% of that going toward AI. That capex spending was more than double SpaceX's revenues for the quarter.
Musk has been upfront that SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February, is lagging behind frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Last month, Musk quote-tweeted a user who put Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra ahead of SpaceXAI's frontier model.
"Accurate (for now)," he wrote.
SpaceXAI has since rebranded as SpaceXSI, following Musk's alignment with President Donald Trump's preferred rebranding of "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence."
One area where SpaceXSI has found some success is leasing its compute to Anthropic, Google, and Reflection AI. During the company's last earnings call, SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen said the leasing arrangements had generated $1.6 billion in additional revenue.