SpaceX Earnings: Elon Wants 13 GW of AI Compute by the End of 2027. Where will he get the power?
SpaceX earnings put a 13 GW AI compute target on 2027. Nvidia's share of that bill is easy to trace, while most of the 20 GW of power meant to run it hasn't been ordered in public.
SpaceX reported third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, its second report as a public company, and Elon Musk spent a good part of the call talking about power plants instead of rockets. Revenue came in at $14.6 billion, which is 161% more than a year ago. The AI unit SpaceX calls Super Intelligence (the old xAI, which SpaceX bought in February) brought in $7.6 billion of that, so it now outsells Starlink. $SPCX rose about 6.6% after hours.
"I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year," Elon said on the call. SpaceX has 1.7 GW running today and expects 2.5 GW to 3 GW by the end of December. He also put annual recurring revenue (the revenue SpaceX is booking right now, multiplied out to a year) at "somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion" by the end of 2027, and called it a goal. The nearer goal of $100 billion by the end of this year still stands.
SpaceX's 13 GW against everyone else's 2027
Elon said he's "fairly confident" of adding an incremental 10 GW of compute next year. You get a sense of the size when you hold it up against the whole industry. Brad Gerstner (the founder of Altimeter Capital) quoted SemiAnalysis's Dylan Patel on the BG2 podcast saying the world will bring on 43 GW of new AI compute next year. If both numbers hold, one company builds about a quarter of it.
Elon also called over 20 GW of compute next year "a small possibility." That would put SpaceX near 40% of the industry's new capacity. He framed it as a long shot, and I'd treat it as one.
Nvidia books most of the compute bill
Elon didn't say "Nvidia" on the call. But he said next year's fleet will be "primarily Rubin, Vera Rubin compute," which is Nvidia's next rack after the GB300s SpaceX is installing now. Earlier this month SpaceX went looking for about $40 billion of debt to pay for Nvidia chips (see our earlier coverage).
Jensen Huang told the same podcast that $NVDA now sells "40 plus" billion dollars of gear into every gigawatt, because it ships the networking, CPUs and storage along with the GPUs. At his price, 10 GW of new compute comes to roughly $400 billion of Nvidia equipment (our math, using his number). That lands on Nvidia's data center line, shipped by the rack.
SpaceX can't pay for that at today's pace. CFO Bret Johnsen guided fourth-quarter capex to $35 billion to $40 billion. A full year at that rate is $140 billion to $160 billion (our annualization). So spending has to climb a lot next year or the compute target slips, and the $500 billion revenue goal is how Elon plans to fund the climb.
The 20 GW of power and cooling is the challenge
Elon said the limit on deploying AI "is more in power and cooling and infrastructure than it is in chips." SpaceX will "aim for an incremental 20 gigawatts of power cooling and infrastructure next year." He added that "20 is difficult but not impossible." Part of his answer is that SpaceX now casts its own turbine blades and vanes (our earlier coverage), which he says brings power online "12 to 18 months faster than anyone else."
Where SpaceX gets its power and cooling in 2027
The biggest piece on the record is a permanent gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi, a few miles from Colossus 2. Mississippi regulators approved an air permit for 41 turbines there on March 10, and together they come to about 1.2 GW. The turbines are Titan-350s made by Solar Turbines, a $CAT subsidiary, according to Global Energy Monitor, which lists the plant's larger second unit as starting in 2027. Solaris Energy Infrastructure (it rents gas generation to data centers for a living) deployed them through a joint venture of which it owns 50%, sized at about 900 MW in its annual report.
The second piece is Doosan Enerbility (the Korean power equipment maker), which sold xAI five 380 MW gas turbines. That's about 1.9 GW, but no site has been named for it. Even if all of that counted toward next year, it's about 3 GW of the 20.
Some power also goes away next year. SpaceX agreed to remove the 69 temporary turbines at its Southaven site by July 2027, so part of the new plant replaces generation that's already running today.
On batteries, SpaceX buys from its sister company. $TSLA sold SpaceX about $295 million of Megapacks in the second quarter, the batteries that sit between the turbines and the racks and smooth out the load. Beyond gas, Elon said SpaceX wants "solar, wind, and every other source of power that we can obtain," but he didn't name a project. The Information reported in July that SpaceX was scouting Texas sites for a gigawatt-scale campus, which SpaceX hasn't confirmed.
Cooling is the thinnest part of the public record. Elon named "the cooling, the batteries, the networking" as the gear he needs, but not who makes it. Epoch AI's satellite count at Colossus 2 shows 217 air-cooled chillers and 144 condensers, good for about 412 MW of cooling, and Epoch lists the maker of both as unknown. I haven't found a cooling vendor tied to SpaceX's new sites.
So roughly 17 GW of next year's target has no named site, turbine or cooling supplier yet. $GEV and Siemens Energy have turbine queues years long, and SpaceX started casting its own blades to get around them. Caterpillar, Doosan and Solaris have already sold into Elon's sites, so they start with an edge on the next order.
Half of the 13 GW goes up for rent
Elon wants to split the fleet "50-50, more or less" between SpaceX's own models and outside customers, priced at "effectively the spot market rate." He says SpaceX is "hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler" (the big cloud companies) for capacity. At 13 GW that's something like 6 GW of GPUs rented at the going rate, while $CRWV and $NBIS mostly sell multi-year contracts. (Elon thinks compute gets more valuable per watt over time, so he doesn't want to lock in today's price.) SpaceX does carry $63 billion of contracted backlog. About $42 billion of it turns into revenue over the next 12 months.
What SpaceX's 2027 plan still needs
Nvidia's share of the 13 GW is the easiest part of the plan to trace. The chips already have a vendor and a $40 billion loan in the works. The power has a target and a blade foundry, with about 3 GW of identified turbines and no named cooling supplier. I'm watching for the next big generation order from Caterpillar, Doosan, Solaris or a turbine maker SpaceX hasn't used before, because that's the first hard sign SpaceX can get to 20 GW.
Elon said he'd be surprised to end next year under 13 GW. The turbine orders will show whether to be surprised long before the chips do.