SpaceX's AI compute deals with Anthropic and Google drove revenue to $2.6B

SpaceX is looking less like a rocket company and more like an AI infrastructure provider. The company’s AI division pulled in $2.6 billion last quarter—more than tripling its revenue year-over-year—largely on the back of deals to rent out its computing power to Anthropic in May and Google in June. That revenue haul now dwarfs its legacy space business, which generated $962 million, and it’s closing in on the Starlink internet service’s $4.2 billion. The pivot is so dramatic that SpaceX, in its IPO paperwork, openly stated it expects most of its value to come from AI.

But the pivot is brutally expensive. The AI unit alone posted a $1.5 billion operating loss for the quarter, and capital expenditures ballooned to $18.37 billion. Elon Musk framed the spending spree as a land grab: “We’re building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else, we believe, and we’re significantly improving our AI models,” he told analysts. The strategy puts SpaceX in direct competition with neoclouds like CoreWeave, turning a company famous for reusable rockets into a direct rival to the specialized cloud providers fueling the AI boom.

Musk’s AI ambitions have a clear backstory that explains the sudden shift. The company’s own model, Grok, had fallen badly behind competitors, and it was mired in controversy for generating non-consensual explicit imagery. Rather than let its massive data center capacity sit idle, SpaceX flipped the script, renting it out to other AI firms ahead of its IPO. The company is also trying to acquire Cursor to bolt on an enterprise AI product, though Musk cautioned on the call that they’re “close to that” but don’t want to “jump the gun” on regulatory approval.

For all the AI spectacle, it’s the humble connectivity business that’s keeping the lights on. Starlink is the only profitable segment, and its future depends on Starship—the massive rocket whose development costs rose $389 million this quarter. Starship needs to launch heavier next-gen satellites; SpaceX has already put 20 of them in orbit but is still far from the full deployment of 60 at once. The company’s overall loss narrowed to $143 million, and while it beat analyst estimates, shares dipped after an initial pop. The market seems to be asking the same question: can Musk simultaneously fund a space colony and an AI empire?