Elon Musk. Photo: IMAGE PRESS AGENCY / NURPHOTO / NURPHOTO VIA AFP
SpaceX on Tuesday reported its first quarterly profit as a public company, as deals to rent out computing power to AI firms sent revenue at its artificial intelligence unit soaring.
Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company posted net income of $4.4 billion for the July-September period, compared with a loss of $1.1 billion a year earlier.
Revenue jumped 161 percent to $14.6 billion.
SpaceX shares rose more than 2 percent in after-hours trading.
The results follow a bumpy start on Wall Street.
SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on June 12 after an IPO priced at $135 a share that raised about $85.7 billion.
Its first earnings report as a listed company showed second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion and a net loss of $541 million.
The AI division, which SpaceX now calls “Super Intelligence,” drove the turnaround. Super Intelligence is US President Donald Trump’s preferred term for AI.
The unit’s revenue rose more than nine times from a year earlier to $7.6 billion, overtaking the Starlink satellite internet business as the company’s largest source of sales.
– Cloud computing –
SpaceX credited new cloud services agreements, wider adoption of its Grok chatbot and its acquisition of Cursor, an AI coding startup.
SpaceX’s cloud customers include Anthropic, which agreed in May to pay nearly $45 billion over three years for computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus data centers.
Google signed on in June, agreeing to pay $920 million a month from October through June 2029.
The AI unit turned an operating profit of $431 million, compared with a loss of $1.7 billion a year earlier.
As at other AI companies, spending remains heavy.
SpaceX invested $19.6 billion in the quarter, $16.4 billion of it in AI, bringing capital spending for the first nine months of the year to $48 billion.
Its computing capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier.
Revenue at the Starlink satellite internet unit grew 69 percent to $5.2 billion, and consumer subscribers reached 13.6 million.
Average monthly revenue per consumer, however, fell to $69 from $83 a year earlier.
SpaceX also completed the first revenue-generating flight of Starship, the giant rocket central to Musk’s Mars ambitions and to deploying satellites at scale.
The flight carried 26 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit.
The company said it had agreed to buy spectrum licenses for a planned Starlink mobile service, in a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027.
The results come just ahead of another wave of potential SpaceX share sales.
Under the IPO lockup terms, up to 1.3 billion shares owned by company insiders and early investors become eligible for sale two trading days after third-quarter results.
AFP