SpaceX’s first turns as a public company have recast Elon Musk’s rocket maker as an AI infrastructure wager. The numbers are growing fast; the bill, and investors’ patience, may be growing faster.

After June’s historic IPO and the subsequent push to fold AI more deeply into the company, Musk told employees that artificial intelligence had become an “extremely important part of SpaceX’s future.” He predicted AI revenue would exceed every other SpaceX business as soon as September and widen that lead in the fourth quarter. The plan includes training Grok on the company’s accumulated information, turning employees, in Musk’s words, into “the parents of the AI.”¹

The strategy is also a hardware bet. Musk said SpaceX would use Nvidia GPUs exclusively, arguing they are “the best.”Elon Musk (elonmusk)² That sits alongside ambitions to put data-center capacity in orbit, a Cursor acquisition still awaiting clearance, and a broader contest with terrestrial AI-compute providers.

The first earnings report gave Musk’s case real momentum. Revenue rose 92% year on year to $7.81 billion, led by $4.29 billion in connectivity, while AI brought in $2.56 billion—up 247%—and space revenue reached $962 million. Yet the shares, which had risen 9.4% during the session, fell more than 8% after hours. Visible Alpha’s Melissa Otto warned that investors increasingly doubt whether AI infrastructure can produce returns matching “the level of cash needed.”³

That skepticism is rooted in the scale of the buildout. Another account of the quarter put AI revenue at $2.6 billion and reported $18.37 billion in capital expenditures, alongside a $1.5 billion quarterly AI loss. Musk insisted, “We’re building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else.”⁴ The divide is now stark: SpaceX sees a route from rockets to orbital AI factories; investors see a vast, still-unproven tab.