SpaceX is inching closer to this lofty $100 billion milestone

By William Gavin

SpaceX has set an ambitious revenue target, and a newly disclosed computing-power deal could get the company a bit nearer to its goal

SpaceX aims to have a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2026.

SpaceX has notched another deal selling artificial-intelligence computing power, bringing it closer to an ambitious revenue milestone.

Bret Johnsen, SpaceX's (SPCX) longtime chief financial officer, said at a Goldman Sachs conference on Thursday that the company had signed a deal for AI computing power with an undisclosed company earlier this month. He said the deal is worth $1.1 billion a month beginning in December, and valued it at about $13 billion worth of annualized revenue.

The deal will bring SpaceX closer to its goal of a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2026. Companies use ARR to estimate future full-year revenue based on performance over a shorter time horizon. Reaching the $100 billion goal would be a huge improvement compared to where SpaceX was just a few months ago.

Deutsche Bank's Edison Yu has estimated that SpaceX's June-quarter run rate was just $31 billion, but he said in a note last month that the $100 billion target is "likely very achievable, driven mainly by neocloud and Cursor contribution," a reference to a startup acquired by SpaceX.

Companies working on AI are hungry for more computing power, which is in short supply relative to the demands of the industry. More than $36 trillion is expected to be spent on computing capacity through 2050, according to a PWC report. And SpaceX, Microsoft (MSFT) and other companies have made selling and renting out cloud-computing capacity a big business.

In July, SpaceX signed a $6.7 billion, six-month computing-power deal with an undisclosed customer that several analysts have said is possibly the U.S. Defense Department. SpaceX also has multiyear deals providing computing power to Anthropic, a major rival; Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), which is both a rival and a SpaceX investor; and startup Reflection AI.

Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month in a deal that ends in May 2029, while Google has agreed to a rate of $920 million a month from next month through June 2029, according to filings.

There is a caveat to SpaceX's deals. Johnsen said that "almost all, if not all of" SpaceX's computing deals allow for both sides to end the deal prematurely after just a few months. As a result, SpaceX risks losing those multibillion-dollar deals ahead of schedule.

However, Johnsen said the early expiration is because of SpaceX's "internal conviction" in its own products, which need computing power for their own inference and training.

"You don't want to get into a situation where you constrain your own products in the years to come because you were giving away the compute forever," Johnsen added.

-William Gavin

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

09-10-26 1819ET