SpaceX said on Tuesday, Oct. 20, that its AI business made money in the three months to Sept. 30. It earned $431 million in operating profit, the money left from sales after the costs of running the business, before interest and taxes. A year earlier it lost $1.7 billion, and in the quarter before it lost $1.3 billion. Its revenue rose ninefold from a year earlier to $7.6 billion, more than half of SpaceX's $14.6 billion total and more than the $5.2 billion from SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet business.
SpaceX calls the business Super Intelligence, though superintelligence, AI much smarter than people, remains a goal no one has reached. It holds Elon Musk's AI company xAI, which became part of SpaceX earlier this year, and its Grok chatbot, along with the data centers SpaceX rents to other companies and, since August, the coding tool Cursor. It also sells advertising, which brought in $538 million of its revenue in the quarter.
SpaceX says the growth came mainly from three things: new deals to rent the computing power in its data centers to other companies, its purchase of Cursor, and more businesses and people using Grok. SpaceX's data center customers include Anthropic, the maker of Claude, which signed in May to use Colossus 1, one of those data centers, though the results don't say which deals drove the quarter's jump. Cursor, which SpaceX bought in August at a value of $60 billion, added $608 million of revenue between the deal's close on Aug. 14 and the end of September.
The profit is small next to what the business spends. SpaceX spent $16.4 billion on buildings and equipment for the AI business in the quarter, more than twice its revenue, as it keeps building data centers, and almost $40 billion so far this year. Over the first nine months of 2026 the AI business still lost $3.3 billion. The $431 million profit is after a $1.2 billion cost for SpaceX share awards for Cursor's staff, given as part of the purchase to keep them, and SpaceX values all the awards tied to their work after the purchase at $23.4 billion, less any forfeited if staff leave, so most of that cost is still to come. Most of SpaceX's operating profit still comes from Starlink, which earned $2.4 billion in the quarter, while the rocket business lost $7 million.
Overall, SpaceX, which went public in June, reported net income, its profit after every cost, interest and tax, of $4.4 billion, against a $1.1 billion loss a year earlier. That is more than its $2.8 billion operating profit, helped by interest and other income and a tax benefit. Over the first nine months of the year it still lost $413 million. SpaceX gives the size of its AI data centers in gigawatts: 1.7 gigawatts on Sept. 30, up from 1.4 in June and 0.6 a year earlier, as it keeps building a second data center, Colossus II.
SpaceX's results do not name the customers behind the cloud deals signed this quarter or say how long they run, so it is not clear how much of the jump will repeat. On the company's call with investors, Musk said he expects the AI business to be bringing in revenue at a yearly rate of $500 billion to $1 trillion by the end of 2027, according to a news report. SpaceX's written results give no such forecast, and analysts expect SpaceX's total revenue for all of 2027 to be about $110 billion, according to the same report.