SpaceX entered public markets in June with a costly expansion already underway. By August, it reported a $541 million quarterly loss and said it had accumulated $13 billion in losses since the start of 2023 — a reminder that rockets, satellite internet and AI infrastructure do not come cheap.¹

The third quarter changed the headline. For July through September, SpaceX reported $4.4 billion in profit, reversing the prior quarter’s loss. Musk used the earnings call to sketch an almost surreal destination: annual recurring revenue of “somewhere between $500 billion and a trillion” by the end of 2027, versus roughly $27 billion recorded so far in 2026.¹

The engine of that optimism is no longer primarily Starlink. The renamed Super Intelligence unit — built around Grok, the acquired Cursor coding tool and leased data-center capacity — generated roughly $7.5 billion in quarterly revenue, ahead of Starlink’s $5.2 billion. It accounted for 52% of income, while the company also reached 13.6 million Starlink customers.² Musk marked the reported quarter with a brief “Congrats SpaceX team!” as a post accompanying highlights cited $14.6 billion in revenue, up 161% year on year.Elon Musk (elonmusk)³

But the same results underscored the scale of the wager. Capital expenditure reached $19.6 billion in the quarter, including $16.4 billion tied to AI. CFO Bret Johnsen said spending could jump to $35 billion to $40 billion this quarter as new compute comes online, though he argued new deployments at current prices can pay back in under a year.⁴

Musk’s argument is that chips are no longer the bottleneck; “power and cooling and infrastructure” are. SpaceX says demand is strong enough that it could lease its computing capacity several times over. The test now is whether that demand can keep pace with the cash required to build it.⁴