SpaceX is officially in the landlord business. The company posted third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion, up 161% from a year earlier and well ahead of the $12.72 billion analysts expected, while net income swung from a $1.1 billion loss to a $4.4 billion profit, according to Reuters. Per-share earnings of 45 cents nearly quadrupled the 13-cent consensus. Shares rose about 2.5% in extended trading.
The engine behind the beat wasn't rockets — it was renting out GPUs. AI revenue rose more than ninefold to $7.6 billion, "mostly from renting out computing capacity," with compute contracts going to Anthropic, Alphabet's Google, and Reflection AI. In other words: Grok is being overshadowed by the same labs that are now paying SpaceX to power their models. SpaceX's own AI software, including Grok, "has so far been overshadowed by rivals OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google."
"We are in an inflection moment for SpaceX across launch, connectivity and superintelligence," Musk said on the investor call.
There's a reason this landed the way it did today. Tech stocks slipped broadly on Tuesday on exactly the fear this report punctures: that the AI boom is a debt-fueled buildout with nobody making money on the infrastructure. CoreWeave clawed back a 6% intraday slide on those worries. SpaceX just showed the counter-example — the landlord model works, as long as you actually have customers. It helps that its customers are the hyperscalers themselves.
The catch is on the other side of the ledger. SpaceX poured $19.6 billion into capital spending, with $16.4 billion of it going to AI, and expects that pace to continue. The AI unit itself is still running large operating losses, and the company cautioned it will need sustained investment before it can generate profits consistently. The financial engine paying for all of it remains Starlink and the broader connectivity business, which kept expanding its subscriber base across consumer, enterprise, aviation, maritime, and government.
Watch next: whether SpaceX can keep renting capacity faster than it burns cash building it — and whether Anthropic, currently paying SpaceX for compute, ends up needing less of it as its own $45 billion data-center plans take shape. The strangest trade in AI right now might be the one where a lab pays its rival's rocket company for GPUs.
— via Reuters