xAI burned $6.4B last year. SpaceX’s IPO filing shows why the spending is far from over

Source: TechCrunch

Financial Overview

Elon Musk’s xAI lost $6.4 billion from operations on $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings. The losses are expected to grow as SpaceX plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters,” a move that will likely require significant additional compute spending.

Musk merged his AI company xAI — which had previously acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) — with his rocket and satellite company SpaceX in February before announcing that the combined company would go public this year. While AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also eyeing public debuts in 2026, SpaceX’s IPO is expected to be one of the largest in history with a potential $1.75 trillion valuation.

The SEC filing provides the first public glimpse into xAI (and X’s) financials. In 2024, xAI recorded a loss of $1.56 billion on $2.62 billion in revenue. By 2025, losses had ballooned to $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion, widening the gap between earnings and spending.

Revenue Breakdown

• AI solutions and infrastructure revenue: $465 million (including $365 million from X and Grok subscription revenue and $88 million from data licensing).
• Advertising revenue: $116 million.

AI segment capital expenditures rose from $12.7 billion in 2025 to $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, an annualized capex run rate of about $30.8 billion, more than doubling year‑over‑year.

User Metrics

SpaceX reported 117 million monthly active users (MAUs) for Grok AI features as of March 2026, out of 550 million total MAUs across Grok and X combined. This indicates that roughly one‑fifth of the combined ecosystem is actively using Grok AI features.

AI Compute Infrastructure

The filing’s “use of proceeds” section mentions an “expansion of our AI compute infrastructure”. xAI’s Colossus and Colossus II data centers — launched in 122 days and 91 days respectively — collectively provide about 1 gigawatt of compute power for Grok’s training and inference. SpaceX claims that owning this infrastructure and vertically integrating across the AI stack enables them to “train and iterate frontier models at lower cost and higher velocity.”

Future Plans

SpaceX may also address investor concerns by performing training and inference on orbital data centers, a concept Musk has promoted as a cheaper alternative to terrestrial facilities. The filing states that SpaceX intends to begin deploying orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028, marking the first concrete timeline for such a launch.

“The future of AI will be determined by control of the physical stack.”