By Hamza Faisal

Elon Musk's SpaceX delivered a quarter that looks like it came from two different companies: a rocket business growing at a steady 6% clip, and an AI business that multiplied ninefold in three months. The company reported third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion on Tuesday — up 161% from a year earlier and well ahead of the $12.72 billion analysts expected, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Even more striking, SpaceX posted a net profit of $4.4 billion for the three months ended September 30, versus the $1.57 billion analysts had penciled in. It is the company's first profit as a publicly traded firm — and a sharp reversal from the $541 million net loss it recorded on $7.81 billion of revenue in the second quarter.

The AI unit is the whole story

The growth came almost entirely from SpaceX's AI segment — which Musk has renamed "SpaceX Super Intelligence" — where revenue surged nearly 830% to $7.6 billion. The unit grew out of February's acquisition of Musk's startup xAI and now spans the Grok chatbot, the social platform X, and a fast-growing data-center operation.

But SpaceX isn't really selling AI models. It's selling the shovels: the company makes most of its AI money renting out data-center capacity to frontier developers including Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI — a business closer to a cloud provider's than an AI lab's. Under a long-term deal worth nearly $45 billion, Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month until May 2029 to lease capacity from SpaceX's Colossus data center.

Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen told investors on the company's first-ever video earnings call — livestreamed on X — that the division had reached a "clear inflection."

The bill for the boom

The expansion is ferociously expensive. Capital spending hit $19.6 billion for the quarter, nearly triple the $6.9 billion spent a year earlier, and the AI unit swallowed $16.4 billion of it — versus just $1.6 billion for the space business and $1.5 billion for satellites. SpaceX expects spending to stay near that level in the near term.

August's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, the popular AI coding tool, has been folded into the AI unit, and the company warned the division is still posting large operating losses. Reuters noted that SpaceX's own AI software, including Grok, remains overshadowed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google — and SpaceX has cautioned it will need sustained investment before the AI unit can consistently generate profits.

Starlink keeps printing

The rest of the machine kept humming. The connectivity business — anchored by Starlink — reported $5.2 billion in revenue, up nearly 70% from a year earlier, with consumer subscribers climbing to 13.6 million as of September 30 from 12 million three months earlier. The space business added $1.8 billion, up 6%.

Analysts are watching Starlink pricing closely: SpaceX has acquired Grain Management's 800MHz spectrum portfolio for around $8 billion, which will let it launch a mobile service directly to US consumers by the end of the year, though expanding into lower-income markets could push average revenue per user lower over time.

SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in mid-June in the largest initial public offering in history. The shares, which briefly topped $200 after debuting at $135, had steadied around $150 in recent weeks — and rose more than 4% in after-hours trading after Tuesday's results.

— Hamza Faisal