SpaceX Posts Blockbuster Q3: Revenue Up 161% to $14.6B as Super Intelligence Becomes Its Biggest Business

SpaceX delivered a blockbuster third quarter on October 20, reporting revenue of $14.58 billion — up 161% from $5.6 billion a year earlier and well ahead of the roughly $12.7–13 billion analysts expected. Net income hit $4.4 billion versus a $1.1 billion loss in the prior-year quarter, with adjusted EBITDA up 306% to $8.8 billion and adjusted earnings per share of about $0.35, more than double the roughly $0.13–0.16 consensus. It was SpaceX’s second quarterly report since its June IPO, and its first solidly profitable quarter as a public company.

The defining shift: the Super Intelligence (SI) segment — the company’s renamed AI business, covering cloud services, Grok models, the Cursor coding tools acquired earlier this year and the Grok Bot personal agent — generated $7.56 billion in revenue, an 830% year-over-year increase, making it the company’s largest segment for the first time. Connectivity, primarily Starlink, produced $5.25 billion, up 69%, while the legacy Space segment grew a modest 6% to $1.77 billion. Starlink ended the quarter with 13.6 million consumer subscribers, adding 1.6 million in the quarter and growing 89% year over year. Nameplate compute capacity reached 1.7 GW, up from 1.4 GW in June and 0.6 GW a year ago.

The growth has a price tag. Capital expenditures totaled $19.6 billion in the quarter, with $16.4 billion directed to AI infrastructure including the Colossus facilities — and management guided fourth-quarter capex of $35 billion to $40 billion. SpaceX expects first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion and says it remains on track for $100 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026, measured by annualizing December revenue. Musk also floated an eye-popping target: $500 billion to $1 trillion in recurring annual revenue by the end of 2027. The quarter even produced space hardware history: Starship Flight 14, the first orbital Starship mission, delivered 26 Starlink V3 satellites — about 10 times the downlink capacity added per launch as a Falcon 9.

The honest caveats: only $2.79 billion of the $4.4 billion net income was operating profit, with the rest including interest income, tax benefits and unexplained items — the headline number is real but flattered. And the AI revenue surge leans heavily on cloud-services agreements that are lumpy by nature. Still, $63 billion in backlog and roughly $90 billion in cash and marketable securities give SpaceX enormous room to keep building. The same call where these numbers dropped is where Musk confirmed Tesla-SpaceX merger talks — AI, not rockets, is now the center of gravity for both companies.