SpaceX Posts $4.4bn Profit as AI Overtakes Starlink

SpaceX is still best known for rockets, but in the three months to September its biggest business was artificial intelligence. Its Super Intelligence (SI) segment brought in $7.56bn of the company’s $14.58bn revenue, more than the Starlink-led Connectivity arm and more than four times the launch business, according to third-quarter results SpaceX filed with the SEC on 20 October.

The quarter shows the computing capacity SpaceX has been building since it took over xAI starting to pay its way, and it lifted the company to a net profit of $4.4bn, against a $1.05bn loss a year earlier. It also shows the bill: $19.6bn of capital spending in a single quarter, $16.4bn of it on SI. (For how Musk’s businesses now fit together, see TSN’s Musk Companies hub.)

Revenue was “up 161% year-over-year, fueled by our Super Intelligence (SI) segment and accelerated growth in Connectivity,” the company said. That was well ahead of the $12.72bn analysts had expected, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters, which said analysts had pencilled in a profit of $1.57bn.

Rented computing power drove most of the AI growth

Almost all of the SI segment’s revenue, $7.02bn, came from what SpaceX calls “SI solutions & infrastructure”, with advertising adding $538m. The company credits cloud services agreements, its acquisition of the AI coding tool Cursor and wider use of its Grok models. Cursor, bought on 14 August at an implied equity value of $60bn, contributed $608m between the deal closing and the end of September.

Reuters puts it more bluntly: SpaceX is making its AI money mainly by renting data-centre capacity to developers such as Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI, “rather than from its own models”. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen told analysts that, even without Cursor, SI solutions and infrastructure revenue grew 192% on the previous quarter, “driven primarily by the activation of new cloud services agreements”, according to the call transcript.

The segment made an operating profit of $431m, after $1.2bn of share-based compensation tied to the Cursor deal. Its nameplate computing capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts at 30 September, up from 1.4GW in June and 0.6GW a year earlier, as the Colossus II build-out continued. Johnsen said SpaceX expects close to 2GW by the end of October and 2.5GW to 3GW by the end of the year.

Starlink kept growing while launches barely broke even

The segment table makes the split plain. Connectivity, which is mostly Starlink, grew revenue 69% and nearly doubled its operating income. The Space segment, which carries the cost of developing Starship, lost $7m at the operating level, an improvement on a $542m loss in the second quarter.

Segment	Revenue ($m)	Operating income ($m)
Space	1,767	(7)
Connectivity	5,248	2,367
Super Intelligence	7,560	431
Total	14,575	2,791

Source: SpaceX third-quarter 2026 earnings release (Form 8-K), three months to 30 September 2026.

Starlink ended the quarter with 13.6 million consumer subscribers, up 1.6 million in three months and above the 12.19 million analysts expected, Reuters reported. Average monthly revenue per consumer rose to $69 from $66 in the second quarter, though it was $83 a year earlier, a decline Reuters links to expansion abroad with cheaper plans. After the quarter ended, SpaceX agreed to buy 800 MHz spectrum licences for its Starlink Mobile plans, a deal it expects to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

More than a third of the profit came from below the operating line

Not all of the $4.4bn came from running the businesses. Operating income across the group was $2.79bn; the rest came from $873m of interest income, $1.03bn of other income (of which $561m was from a related party) and a $390m tax benefit, partly offset by $675m of interest expense. Interest income was $873m, against $155m a year earlier; SpaceX ended September with $51.3bn in cash and $38.6bn in marketable securities, after raising $85.7bn net from its June listing.

The measure SpaceX puts alongside those figures, adjusted EBITDA, was $8.8bn, up 306%. That is a non-GAAP figure: it strips out, among other things, $3.64bn of depreciation and amortisation and $2.36bn of share-based compensation, both large costs for a company filling data centres with servers and issuing equity awards to Cursor staff.

The next Starship test is a catch of both stages

SpaceX also described Flight 14, Starship’s first orbital flight, as its “first revenue-generating Starship mission”, carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Neither stage was recovered, and one Raptor engine shut down early during ascent, The Verge reported.

On the call, Musk said the next attempt goes further. “For flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we’re going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship,” he said, which would be the first full recovery of an orbital launch vehicle. He hedged in the same breath: “Success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I’d say it’s more likely than not that this succeeds next flight.” President Gwynne Shotwell said SpaceX expects the FAA licence for Flight 15 “to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages”. SpaceX has not given a launch date; earlier this month Musk put the flight about four weeks away.

Musk went further on the money too, saying annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027 would be “somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion”, a forecast he gave without a breakdown. The company’s own guidance is narrower: Johnsen forecast first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33bn to $37bn, fourth-quarter capital spending of $35bn to $40bn, and reaffirmed a goal of $100bn in annualised revenue, based on December, by the end of this year. Musk also said on the call that SpaceX and Tesla have set up special committees to consider a merger, which TSN covers separately.

That December run-rate is the figure to watch. The fourth-quarter results will show whether nearly double this quarter’s capital spending turns into revenue at the pace Johnsen has promised, and whether Flight 15 brings both halves of Starship back to the tower.