SpaceX Q3 2026 Earnings: Revenue Up 161% on AI and Starlink

SpaceX just posted a quarter that made Wall Street sit up. In its third-quarter 2026 results, filed with the SEC on October 20, the company reported revenue of $14.6 billion, up 161% from $5.6 billion a year earlier, and net income of $4.4 billion, swinging from a $1.1 billion loss. Shares of SPCX rose roughly 10% in early trading on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk's markets live blog. Let's break down where all that growth came from.

• Revenue: $14.6 billion, up 161% year over year
• Profit: net income of $4.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 billion, up 306%
• Starlink: 13.6 million consumer subscribers, up from 7.2 million a year ago, with Connectivity revenue up 69% to $5.2 billion
• AI segment: Super Intelligence revenue of $7.6 billion, up 830%, including $608 million from Cursor

What Drove SpaceX's Q3 2026 Revenue?

The biggest mover was the segment SpaceX calls Super Intelligence, or SI, which includes its Grok models, cloud services agreements and the Cursor coding platform it acquired on August 14. SI revenue hit $7.6 billion, up from $813 million a year earlier. The company credits new cloud services agreements, the Cursor acquisition and growing Grok adoption among businesses and consumers, plus the launch of Grok Bot, which it describes as an always-on agentic system. Nameplate compute reached 1.7 gigawatts at the end of September, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier.

That segment is also where the spending is. SI capital expenditure was $16.4 billion in the quarter as SpaceX keeps building out its Colossus II infrastructure, so this is a growth story that is still investing heavily.

How Is Starlink Doing?

Very well. Connectivity revenue climbed 69% year over year to $5.2 billion, and income from operations in the segment nearly doubled to $2.4 billion. Consumer subscribers grew by 1.6 million in the quarter alone to 13.6 million, with monthly average revenue per user improving 5% sequentially to $69. Enterprise and government revenue jumped 91%, and more than 3,800 aircraft now carry Starlink. After the quarter, SpaceX also agreed to acquire 800 MHz spectrum licenses for its Starlink Mobile plans, expected to close in the first half of 2027.

What About Rockets?

The Space segment brought in $1.8 billion, up 84% from the prior quarter, across 35 launches. The milestone of the quarter was Starship Flight 14, the first orbital Starship flight and its first revenue-generating mission, which delivered 26 Starlink V3 satellites, roughly ten times the downlink capacity added by a Falcon 9 Starlink launch, per the company. SpaceX also added NASA crew missions and national security launches to its pipeline.

What Should Investors Watch After SpaceX Earnings?

Nothing here is investment advice, but the numbers tell a clear story. The bull case is obvious from the numbers: three growing businesses, a $51.3 billion cash pile and real profitability. The thing to watch is capital intensity, with total capex of $19.6 billion in the quarter. If you followed our coverage of the SpaceX S-1 filing and Nasdaq listing, this is the clearest look yet at how the pieces fit together as a public company. More earnings breakdowns live in our stock trading section.

Sources: SpaceX — Third Quarter 2026 Results (SEC Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) — October 20, 2026; CoinDesk — Live updates: markets and SpaceX results — October 21, 2026.