SpaceX AI Cloud Now 3x Its Rocket Business
The rocket company that launches satellites just revealed its most profitable business: renting GPUs.
SpaceX's first post-IPO earnings report, released August 4, dropped a number that changes how you see the company. Its AI cloud division brought in $2.6 billion in revenue last quarter, nearly three times the $962 million from its space division. The world's most famous space company is, by its own numbers, primarily an AI infrastructure provider now.
The numbers that rewrite the story
The AI division's $2.6 billion represents a tripling from the year before. Most of it came from compute deals SpaceX struck with Anthropic and Google. The company's space segment (the rockets that made SpaceX a household name) contributed less than a third of that.
Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service, added $4.2 billion in revenue and remains the only profitable division. The combined company still lost $143 million overall, narrowing from prior quarters.
The AI division itself lost $1.5 billion, slightly less than the same quarter last year. SpaceX is spending enormous sums to build and operate its data centers. Capital expenditures reached $18.37 billion, overwhelmingly driven by AI infrastructure.
How a rocket company became a neocloud
The transformation didn't happen by accident. SpaceX merged with Elon Musk's xAI earlier this year, inheriting both Grok (its controversial AI model) and a massive GPU cluster. The company then began renting out the data center capacity it had built for itself.
The scale of those rental deals is staggering. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for access to SpaceX's Colossus I and Colossus II data centers in Memphis, worth $15 billion annually. Google signed on for $920 million per month to lease 110,000 Nvidia GPUs. These two deals alone could nearly double the $18.7 billion in revenue SpaceX reported in all of 2025.
"We're building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else, we believe, and we're significantly improving our AI models," Musk said on an investor call, summing up the company's new identity.
The IPO was really an AI bet
SpaceX's June IPO was the biggest in history. But the company's own S-1 filing made clear that most of its projected value comes from AI, not space. Despite the name on the door, investors were buying into an AI infrastructure play that happens to also build rockets.
The company has three segments: space, AI, and connectivity (Starlink). At the time of the IPO, Goldman Sachs projected SpaceX's AI revenue could increase 100-fold by 2030. Musk has since claimed the company could eventually reach $1 trillion in annual revenue.
The cost of playing the AI game
Building the world's largest neocloud doesn't come cheap. SpaceX spent $12.7 billion on AI capital expenditures in 2025, about 61% of total spend. In the first quarter of 2026, it spent $7.7 billion on AI infrastructure compared to just $1 billion on its space division.
The company is also acquiring Cursor, an AI coding tool, to give it an enterprise AI product. That deal hasn't closed yet, though Musk said on the earnings call they're "close to that."
Musk has floated even more ambitious ideas: building data centers in space, where solar power is constant and cooling is free. The company has already manufactured some of the heavier satellites needed to make this work.
Wall Street is not convinced yet
Despite beating analyst estimates, SpaceX shares declined after hours following the earnings report. The initial pop of enthusiasm gave way to concern about the $18.37 billion in capital spending and the AI division's persistent losses.
The tension is real: SpaceX is winning the AI infrastructure race, but winning is expensive. Its AI revenue is growing faster than its space revenue ever did, but the losses are growing too. The company that made space affordable is now betting everything on making AI compute affordable, and the market is watching to see whether that bet pays off.
Sources
- SpaceX made more revenue as an AI company than a space company - The Verge
- Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year for access to Elon Musk's data centers - The Verge
- SpaceX's AI spending unnerves Wall Street despite promises of quick payoff - CNBC
- SpaceX shares fall on AI spending concerns; Musk says $1 trln revenue possible - Investing.com
- Goldman Sachs expects SpaceX's AI revenue to increase 100-fold by 2030 - Financial Times
- SpaceX lands Google AI compute deal after Anthropic pact ahead of IPO - Reuters