正文 · AI 翻译
IT Home reported on October 21 that SpaceX’s second earnings report, released today (the 21st), showed its AI spending had reached another record high and that capital expenditure could even double soon. The official announcement labels it SI; this article uses AI to conform to Chinese usage.
SpaceX’s AI capital expenditure reached $16.4 billion in the third quarter of this year (IT Home note: approximately 109.738 billion yuan at the current exchange rate), continuing its trend of increasing investment over the past several quarters.
As SpaceX continued to expand infrastructure for AI businesses including Grok, its total third-quarter capital expenditure was approximately $19.6 billion (approximately 131.15 billion yuan at the current exchange rate), broadly in line with Wall Street analysts’ expectations.
Of that, $16.4 billion (approximately 109.738 billion yuan at the current exchange rate) went to its AI business, slightly below analysts’ expectation of $16.9 billion (approximately 113.083 billion yuan at the current exchange rate).
SpaceX expects capital expenditure to rise substantially further this quarter. CFO Brett Johnson predicts it will increase to $35 billion–$40 billion (approximately 234.196 billion–267.653 billion yuan at the current exchange rate) as more computing facilities begin operating. He also expects the new investment to pay for itself quickly: “At current rates, newly deployed computing capacity can pay for itself in less than a year.”
After the earnings report was released, SpaceX shares rose 4% in after-hours trading.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on the earnings call that chips are no longer the biggest bottleneck in building AI infrastructure: “As for SpaceX’s superintelligence business, SpaceXSI—‘sexy’ or whatever. I think people are beginning to realize that the main constraints on deploying superintelligence are not chips, but power, cooling and infrastructure.”
SpaceX’s third-quarter AI business revenue rose sharply from the previous quarter to $7.6 billion (approximately 50.854 billion yuan at the current exchange rate), exceeding analysts’ expectation of $6.3 billion (approximately 42.155 billion yuan at the current exchange rate).
With revenue of $7.6 billion (approximately 50.854 billion yuan at the current exchange rate), the AI business officially surpassed SpaceX’s Starlink business. Starlink revenue for the quarter was $5.2 billion (approximately 34.795 billion yuan at the current exchange rate).
According to Business Insider, SpaceXSI’s computing-capacity rental business has had some success, with customers including Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI. On the previous earnings call, SpaceX CFO Brett Johnson disclosed that computing-capacity rental agreements had brought the company an additional $1.6 billion in revenue (approximately 10.706 billion yuan at the current exchange rate).
Musk said SpaceX has received more requests to rent computing capacity than it can handle: “Honestly, all the hyperscale cloud providers, along with dozens of smaller companies, keep pressing us to rent them more computing capacity. If we agreed to all their requests, our existing capacity would be nowhere near enough; we could rent it out several times over.”
Asked how SpaceX would allocate its computing capacity, Musk said the exact proportions would change from month to month: “Broadly speaking, we want to split it in half: one half for our own use and the other half to rent to other companies. But it could also become a 60–40 split, with either side getting 60%.”