Elon Musk’s xAI is reported to have recorded an operational loss of \(£6.4\) billion on only \(£3.2\) billion in revenue in 2025, based on SpaceX’s IPO filings, with further losses likely as the filing indicates plans to scale Grok to “multiple trillions of parameters”, a major expansion that will probably demand substantial additional compute expenditure.
Elon Musk said that he would go public this year after merging his rocket and satellite company SpaceX with his AI company xAI, which had previously purchased his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), in February. With a possible valuation of $1.75 trillion, SpaceX’s 2026 public debut is expected to be among the biggest in history, even if rival AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic are also planning to do so.
The filing provides the first public look at xAI’s financials and, consequently, X’s. With $2.62 billion in revenue in 2024, xAI reported a $1.56 billion loss. Losses had skyrocketed to $6.4 billion from $3.2 billion by 2025, indicating a growing disparity between xAI’s earnings and expenditures.
According to reports, rival (and client) Anthropic anticipates a 130% increase in revenue to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, resulting in its first operating profit.
”AI solutions and infrastructure revenue” ($465 million), which comprises $365 million in X and Grok subscription income and $88 million in data licensing, accounted for a significant portion of the revenue increase from 2024 to 2025. Advertising contributed an additional $116 million.
Capital expenditures for the AI industry increased from $12.7 billion in 2025 to $7.7 billion in just the first quarter of 2026. That represents an annualised capex run rate of almost $30.8 billion, more than doubling from the previous year.
The number of users has increased as a result of that expenditure thus far, although it is still quite small. As of March 2026, SpaceX reported 117 million monthly active users (MAUs) for Grok AI features, out of 550 million MAUs for both Grok and X combined, according to the filing. This suggests that Grok AI features are only being used by one-fifth of the entire ecosystem.
However, SpaceX plans to continue with Grok; according to the filing, its next-generation AI will scale to “multiple trillions of parameters,” which is a “step change in reasoning in depth and overall intelligence.” This ambitious goal is now documented in the audited annals of SEC history.
It is also a goal that will definitely need more funding. An “expansion of our AI compute infrastructure” is mentioned in the SpaceX filing’s “use of proceeds” section. The filing states that the combined processing power of xAI’s Colossus and Colossus II data centres, which went online in 122 and 91 days, respectively, is around 1 gigawatt.
Grok uses both of these for inference and training. According to SpaceX, they can “train and iterate frontier models at lower cost and higher velocity” because they own the compute infrastructure and vertically integrate throughout the AI stack.
By doing training and inference on orbiting data centres—which Musk has pledged to be a far more affordable option than terrestrial data centres—SpaceX may further allay investor concerns about cost.
However, that sci-fi vision is unlikely to materialise for a number of years. According to the filing, SpaceX plans to start launching its orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028. This is the first specific date for such a launch.
According to the document, “control of the physical stack will determine the future of AI.”
