SpaceX is expanding investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

Third-quarter results released on Oct. 20 (local time) showed SpaceX spent $16.4 billion, or about 21.8 trillion won, in AI-related capital expenditure. The company forecast total capital spending could rise to $35 billion to $40 billion, or about 46.4 trillion won to about 53 trillion won, this quarter as new computing facilities come online.

Total capital spending in the third quarter was $19.6 billion, or about 26.0 trillion won, in line with market expectations. Of that, AI-related spending was $16.4 billion, slightly below the market estimate of $16.9 billion, or about 22.4 trillion won.

SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen (브렛 존슨) forecast a sharp rise in capital spending this quarter due to new computing facilities. "At current prices, the new computing facilities can recoup the investment in less than a year," he said.

Revenue from the AI business also beat market expectations. Third-quarter AI revenue was $7.6 billion, or about 10.1 trillion won, above the market estimate of $6.3 billion, or about 8.4 trillion won. Starlink revenue was $5.2 billion, or about 6.9 trillion won, over the same period. AI segment revenue exceeded Starlink on a quarterly basis for the first time.

After the earnings release, SpaceX shares rose 4 percent in after-hours trading. The company also livestreamed a video of its earnings conference call through X, formerly Twitter.

Elon Musk said a key constraint on expanding AI infrastructure is shifting from semiconductors to power, cooling and infrastructure. He said the factors limiting the building of a superintelligence system are closer to power supply, cooling facilities and related infrastructure than chips.

SpaceX acquired xAI in February and later changed the name of SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. Elon Musk acknowledged as "accurate for now" an assessment last month that Anthropic and OpenAI models are ahead of the company's most advanced model.

SpaceXSI is expanding its computing resource leasing business alongside development of its own AI models. It is leasing computing resources to Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI, among others, and CFO Bret Johnsen said in a previous earnings announcement that related contracts generated an additional $1.6 billion, or about 2.1 trillion won, in revenue.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell (그윈 쇼트웰) said earlier this month that paid weekly users of the agent-style AI assistant Grokbot total 800,000. SpaceX's AI business is taking up a larger share as it pursues large-scale AI infrastructure investment, computing resource leasing and expansion of its own services in parallel.

Q3 2026 highlights: - Delivered revenue of $14.6 billion, up 161% year-over-year - Successfully launched our first revenue-generating Starship mission, delivering 26 Starlink V3 satellites to our broadband constellation, representing approximately 10x the downlink capacity added by a Falcon 9 Starlink launch - Added $6.7 billion of incremental Super Intelligence solutions and infrastructure revenue year-over-year, driven by cloud services agreements, the acquisition of Cursor, and our growing SI models and software applications, including @Grok @Bot - Delivered year-over-year revenue growth of 69% and income from operations growth of 99% for the Connectivity segment, supported by strong momentum in enterprise and government adoption, and continued @Starlink consumer subscriber growth - Continued to scale nameplate compute, reaching 1.7 GW as of September 30, 2026