SpaceX's $15.8 Billion AI Bet

SpaceX's first quarterly report as a public company delivered a strange split-screen: second-quarter revenue nearly doubled to $7.8 billion, while total capital spending rose to about $18.4 billion. Of that, $15.83 billion went into AI, up from $749 million a year earlier. Starlink subscribers doubled to 12 million, giving SpaceX a growing cash engine for its compute buildout.1

Management says the bet can pay back quickly: SpaceX projects more than two gigawatts of compute this year, close to 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, and a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by December. The same day's $10 billion Volta cloud contract shows how aggressively AI labs are competing for power and chips; Bloomberg identified Anthropic as the customer, while Reuters said it could not independently verify that identity.23