Story
Oct 22, 2026
SpaceX’s AI windfall has Musk chasing $1 trillion—and a mounting infrastructure bill
SpaceX’s third-quarter profit was driven by an AI business that has surpassed Starlink in revenue. Musk sees a path to staggering growth, but the company must first finance and build the power, cooling and compute capacity behind it.
SpaceX entered the third quarter after a bruising stretch: it reported a $541 million loss in the prior quarter, following its June public debut, and said it had accumulated $13 billion in losses since the start of 2023. By Tuesday, the company said it had reversed course with $4.4 billion in quarterly profit. Musk cast the turnaround as the opening act for far bigger ambitions, projecting annual recurring revenue of $500 billion to $1 trillion by the end of 2027.1
The immediate engine is the newly renamed “Super Intelligence” division. It generated $7.56 billion in third-quarter revenue—nearly triple its second-quarter figure and ahead of expectations—overtaking Starlink connectivity revenue of $5.25 billion. Total revenue rose 161% year on year to $14.6 billion, while Starlink added 1.6 million consumer subscribers, below analyst forecasts.2 Musk pushed the optimism further on X: “As crazy as this sounds, $1T in SpaceX revenue in 2028 is no longer impossible.”
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But the results also revealed the cost of that wager. SpaceX spent $19.6 billion on capital expenditures in the quarter, including $16.4 billion tied to AI, and CFO Bret Johnsen forecast $35 billion to $40 billion in spending in the current quarter as new compute comes online. Johnsen argued the deployments can repay themselves in under a year; Musk said the binding constraint is now “more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips.”4
That puts execution—not demand—at the center of the story. Musk says hyperscalers and smaller firms are clamoring to rent capacity, while SpaceX is racing to bring its Colossus II data-center project online and using rocket-engine casting capabilities to speed turbine production.5
Investors saw validation: the shares climbed after the report, and Truist analysts said the quarter strengthened the bullish case for AI cloud providers. Yet Musk also floated a SpaceX-Tesla combination, saying the two companies could gain from closer cooperation as the “superintelligence singularity” approaches.6 The quarter delivered the proof of concept. The next test is whether SpaceX can pay for—and power—the scale Musk is promising.