HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Elon Musk has given SpaceX employees a striking view of where the company is heading: within five years, he says, artificial intelligence will account for almost all of its value. In a recent all-hands meeting, Musk told staff that "probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX," adding that "the value of SpaceX will be some astronomical number."
The September crossover
Musk framed the shift as imminent rather than distant. He told the room that SpaceX's AI revenue would "exceed all other space revenue probably in September" and "significantly exceed all other space revenue in the fourth quarter." For a company built on rockets and Starlink, that is a remarkable statement about how quickly its center of gravity is moving.
The numbers behind the rhetoric are already large. On SpaceX's first earnings call on Aug. 4, revenue climbed 92% to $7.8 billion, while AI revenue reached $2.6 billion, up 213% sequentially. The company also reported $14.1 billion in contracted cloud-services agreements, including deals with Anthropic and Google, a sign that its compute ambitions are landing real customers. The scale of that quarter helped fuel talk of a $100 billion revenue run-rate at the company.
A compute buildout on a historic scale
To back the vision, Musk committed SpaceX's AI stack to NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin architecture, telling employees the company expects to receive "a very significant percentage" of NVIDIA's GPUs next year. He set a tentative target of 20 gigawatts of power and cooling capacity by the end of 2027, saying that even with delays SpaceX would likely reach close to 15 gigawatts. The company ended the second quarter with 1.4 gigawatts of nameplate compute and expects to top 2 gigawatts by the end of 2026.
