SpaceX’s AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before, mostly because of deals that the company made to provide compute to other AI companies, according to SpaceX’s quarterly earnings. The AI division, which the company said in its documents to go public was the source of most of its value, lost $1.5 billion this quarter, slightly less than in the same quarter last year.
SpaceX is still losing money, but the loss this quarter narrowed to $143 million dollars. Elon Musk’s grandiose plans — data centers in space, an addressable user market of more than the US GDP — don’t just come with a big price tag in AI. The costs of developing technology in its space division also rose by $389 million from the year before, with Starship as the primary driver of spending. Starship is key to Musk’s plan to expand its connectivity business, the only profitable part of the company.
Starship has to be able to launch heavier versions of the satellites that make its Starlink internet business profitable. Some of these satellites have already been manufactured, and in today’s documents, SpaceX said it had launched 20 of them. It’s not clear how far away the full deployment — of 60 satellites at once — is.
Though SpaceX beat analyst estimates, according to Bloomberg, its shares continued their decline after an initial pop of enthusiasm.