SpaceX's AI business is now its biggest. The Super Intelligence (SI) segment, which includes the former xAI, Grok, Grok Bot, the Cursor coding tools and rented-out data-center compute, brought in $7.56 billion in the third quarter of 2026, ahead of Starlink connectivity at $5.25 billion and launch and space at $1.77 billion, SpaceX said in results filed with the SEC on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. Total revenue was $14.6 billion ($14,575 million), up 161% from $5.6 billion a year earlier.

The headline numbers

  • Net income: $4.4 billion, versus a $1.1 billion loss a year earlier. Operating income was $2.8 billion and adjusted EBITDA $8.8 billion, up 306%.
  • Earnings per share: $0.35, against an expected $0.13, with revenue ahead of a $13 billion estimate, according to a report on Yahoo Finance. Analysts' Bloomberg consensus was $12.89 billion (our preview).
  • Capex: $19.6 billion, of which $16.4 billion went to the SI segment. CFO Bret Johnsen guided fourth-quarter capex of $35 billion to $40 billion and first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion.
  • Backlog: $63 billion at Sept. 30, with about $42 billion expected to be recognized within a year, Johnsen said.

Where the AI money came from

SI solutions and infrastructure revenue was $7.02 billion, up from $2.19 billion in the second quarter, "primarily driven by the activation of new cloud services agreements, the acquisition of Cursor, and increased Grok adoption," the release says. Cursor, acquired on Aug. 14 at a $60 billion implied equity value, contributed $608 million. Advertising on X added $538 million. The SI segment earned $431 million in operating income after $1.2 billion of Cursor-related stock compensation.

SpaceX ended September with 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate compute, up from 1.4 GW in June, as it builds out Colossus II in Memphis. Johnsen said compute was on track for 2.2 GW by the end of October and 2.5 to 3 GW by year-end, and that new deployments currently pay back in "less than a year."

Musk said he is "fairly confident" of adding 10 gigawatts of compute in 2027 and that SpaceX plans a training cluster of 440,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips by the end of the second quarter. He said SpaceX's annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027 could be "somewhere between 100 billion and a trillion." President Gwynne Shotwell said Grok Bot, launched in August, had 800,000 paid weekly users earlier this month, more than doubling in a month.

Starship and Starlink

Starlink ended the quarter with 13.6 million consumer subscribers, up 1.6 million, at $69 a month average revenue per user. Musk said Starship Flight 15, expected next month, will try to catch both the booster and the ship at the tower, which would be the first time an orbital rocket has been fully recovered, Space.com reported.

What it means for Tesla

Musk used the same call to confirm that Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to study a merger (full story). He also gave new dates for Terafab, the chip fab the two companies are building together (Terafab story). Tesla reports its own third quarter on Wednesday, Oct. 21.