SpaceX earnings: Q3 revenue jumps 161% as AI unit leads

SpaceX reported third-quarter 2026 results on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, showing revenue of about $14.6 billion, up 161% from about $5.6 billion a year earlier, and a net profit of $4.4 billion against a loss in the same quarter of 2025. The rise was led by the company's artificial intelligence business, which it calls Super Intelligence. On the earnings call, chief executive Elon Musk also said the boards of SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to look at a possible merger of the two companies, while stressing that no deal is certain.

SpaceX is best known for rockets and the Starlink satellite internet service, but these results show that most of its revenue now comes from AI. The Super Intelligence segment brought in more than half of the quarter's revenue. Much of that comes from what the industry calls a neocloud business: renting out large clusters of computer chips to other companies that train and run AI models. The company is spending heavily to build that capacity. Its capital spending for the first nine months of 2026 reached $48.1 billion, and most of the third quarter's spending went to AI data centres such as Colossus II.

The quarter was also the company's first profitable one since it listed its shares, according to market reports. For investors, this answers part of the question raised at the listing: whether the huge spending on AI computing would turn into revenue quickly. For now, revenue in the AI business grew faster than analysts expected, although the spending remains far larger than the profit.

The merger remark may matter even more over time. Musk said the special committees are made up of independent directors of each board, were set up at shareholders' request, and that he is not part of them because he is a conflicted party under securities rules. He said a combination would be a good idea, pointing to shared work on AI software, chip design and robotics, but added that it would be overstating it to treat a merger as a certainty. Any deal would need approval from both groups of shareholders. Tesla is due to report its own third-quarter results on October 21.

For Indian readers and investors, the numbers show where global technology money is going: into AI computing capacity on a very large scale, much of it paid by other companies renting that capacity.

Short-term: The results beat analysts' revenue estimates and lifted the shares in extended trading. Attention now turns to Tesla's results and to whether either company says more about the merger committees.

Long-term: If AI computing keeps growing at this pace, SpaceX will look increasingly like a cloud and AI company that also launches rockets. A merger with Tesla, if it happened, would create one of the largest corporate combinations on record, but it has not been agreed.

Who is affected: SpaceX and Tesla shareholders, companies that rent AI computing capacity, Starlink users, and rivals in cloud computing and satellite internet.

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