SpaceX landed its fourth billion-dollar AI customer

If you've been watching SpaceX purely as a rocket company, you're missing where a big chunk of its money is actually coming from now.

CFO Bret Johnsen told a Goldman Sachs conference Thursday that SpaceX closed another hosting deal earlier this month, working out to $1.11 billion a month once it kicks in on December 1, roughly $13.3 billion a year.

He did not mention the name of the customer but stated that it further reinforced his belief that SpaceX will be able to achieve its $100 billion revenue goal before the end of the year.

Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month until May 2029 to use Claude through SpaceX's Colossus, Google agreed to pay $920 million per month from October, and Reflection AI will start paying $150 million per month starting June for accessing Nvidia GB300 hardware.

With the new contract, the compute customers of SpaceX alone will contribute more than $3.4 billion per month.

One may think that Johnsen simply forgot about this detail, but it is said that SpaceX compute contracts operate for about six months with exit options, giving SpaceX an opportunity to take back resources in case they need to be used for their AI project, called Grok.

This is what makes all kinds of speculations fly regarding who this unknown client could be, and OpenAI is mentioned as a candidate due to the existing relationship between SpaceX and OpenAI via Cursor.

You're watching SpaceX turn spare data centre capacity, much of it inherited when it absorbed xAI in February, into a genuine second business line.

The company is targeting over two gigawatts of terrestrial computing capacity by the end of this year, climbing to five or ten gigawatts in 2027, and Musk's longer-term bet is that some of this infrastructure eventually leaves the ground entirely. SpaceX still plans to launch its first orbital data centre satellites next year.