SpaceX’s push into AI infrastructure is now a larger part of its business story. Quarterly earnings show a sharp rise in AI revenue, but the same documents also underline a basic tension: the company is bringing in more money from compute while still losing money overall.
AI revenue is growing, but losses remain
SpaceX’s AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before. The source of that growth was mostly compute deals with other AI companies, according to the company’s quarterly earnings.
That puts SpaceX in a different kind of race from the one most people associate with its rockets and satellites. The company is not only building space systems and internet connectivity; it is also selling AI compute capacity to outside customers.
The AI division has been presented by the company as central to its value. In documents to go public, SpaceX said the AI division was the source of most of its value. But the unit is still not profitable: it lost $1.5 billion this quarter, slightly less than in the same quarter last year.
The result is a mixed picture. AI revenue is rising quickly, yet the cost of building and operating the AI business remains heavy enough to keep that division deep in the red.
Compute deals put SpaceX into neocloud competition
SpaceX made deals with Anthropic in May and Google in June to provide compute. Those agreements are the main reason the company’s AI revenue expanded, according to the quarterly earnings described in the source.
By providing compute to other AI companies, SpaceX is competing with other neoclouds such as CoreWeave. In this context, the neocloud business is about supplying the computing capacity that AI companies need to train, run, or improve their systems.
Elon Musk framed the company’s buildout in ambitious terms on an investor call. “We’re building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else, we believe, and we’re significantly improving our AI models,” he said.
That statement captures the company’s strategy: expand compute infrastructure quickly, use it to serve other AI companies, and connect that effort to its own model development. The financial documents show the tradeoff. SpaceX is generating more AI revenue, but it is also spending more to support that expansion.
Spending is rising across AI and space
The increased presence in AI is pushing SpaceX’s spending higher. Capital expenditures reached $18.37 billion, reflecting the scale of investment behind the company’s compute plans.
SpaceX is still losing money overall, although its loss narrowed this quarter to $143 million dollars. That smaller loss matters because it shows improvement from a broader company perspective, even while key parts of the business remain expensive to build.
The pressure is not limited to AI. Costs tied to technology development in the space division also rose by $389 million from the year before. Starship was the primary driver of that spending.
That makes SpaceX’s financial position more complex than a simple AI growth story. The company is trying to expand AI compute while continuing to fund major work in its space division. Both areas are tied to future growth, and both require large spending before they can fully support the company’s ambitions.
Starship remains tied to Starlink’s expansion
Starship is important because it is key to Elon Musk’s plan to expand SpaceX’s connectivity business. That connectivity business is the only profitable part of the company, according to the source.
The link between Starship and Starlink is practical. Starship has to be able to launch heavier versions of the satellites that make the Starlink internet business profitable. Some of those satellites have already been manufactured.
In today’s documents, SpaceX said it had launched 20 of them. The full deployment target described in the source is 60 satellites at once, but it is not clear how far away that milestone is.
That uncertainty is important for understanding the company’s spending. Starship is not only a space project in isolation; it is connected to the future scale of Starlink. If Starlink is the profitable engine, then Starship is part of the infrastructure needed to expand it.
Investors saw both progress and risk
SpaceX beat analyst estimates, according to Bloomberg. Even so, its shares declined after market after an initial pop of enthusiasm.
That reaction fits the split message in the earnings. On one side, AI revenue is growing quickly, the loss narrowed, and compute deals with Anthropic and Google show commercial demand. On the other side, the company is still losing money, the AI division lost $1.5 billion this quarter, and capital expenditures reached $18.37 billion.
For SpaceX, the central issue is whether fast-growing AI compute revenue and an expanded Starlink business can outrun the cost of building both. The quarterly results show momentum, but they also show that the company’s most ambitious plans still come with a large bill.