Elon Musk Promises AI Will Account for 99% of SpaceX's Value in Four to Five Years

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. SpaceX has been selling rocket launches since 2008. Elon Musk has just told his own employees that this is no longer really the company's business. During an internal address broadcast on August 11 on SpaceX's X account, the CEO promised that artificial intelligence would account for 99% of the company's value in four to five years: "I would say five years, for sure, AI will be worth 99% of SpaceX's value. And the value of SpaceX will be an astronomical number." Only 1% would remain for rockets, Starlink, and the rest. Musk precisely situates this shift in the timeline, and it is set to start as early as next month. Key points of this article: * Elon Musk announced that artificial intelligence would constitute 99% of SpaceX's value in four to five years, relegating rockets and Starlink to a secondary role. * SpaceX has heavily invested in its AI infrastructure, aiming to generate between $300 billion and $500 billion in annual revenue, transforming the company into a pioneer of a new space economy. "For sure, our AI revenue will surpass all other space revenue, probably in September, as soon as next month," Musk told his teams, as reported by 247wallst on August 12. He promises an even clearer surpassing in the fourth quarter. Moreover, the figures from the second quarter lend weight to the announcement. The AI revenue of SpaceX reached $2.6 billion during the period, a jump of 213% compared to the previous quarter, on a total revenue of $7.8 billion. This transforms what seemed like a conference quip into a quantified trajectory. Musk committed, during the same exchange, his AI stack (the entirety of his computing infrastructure) to Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture, the new generation of chips from the manufacturer, with a target of 20 gigawatts of computing and cooling power by the end of 2027, reduced to "almost 15 gigawatts" in case of delays. He also mentioned a sharper figure: raising AI capacity to 10 gigawatts by the end of next year would generate, according to him, between $300 billion and $500 billion in annual revenue, reports Teslarati. However, SpaceX was not starting from scratch: it was operating at 1.4 gigawatts of nominal capacity at the end of June. The gap between this starting point and the stated ambition illustrates the scale of the bet. At Melius Research, analyst Ben Reitzes estimates that 2 to 3 gigawatts actually delivered by 2027 would already be enough to generate $100 billion in incremental revenue for Nvidia, with a high scenario up to $1 trillion. Musk did not hide from his employees that the ultimate goal remains unchanged. "We must win the AI battle because the future will be massively made of AI and robots," he explained to them, before assuring that the money earned from computing would finance Starship and the Mars program. The rockets would thus become the pretext rather than the product, a means to pay for space conquest rather than its economic engine. One figure, however, tempers the enthusiasm: moving from 1.4 to 10, or even 20 gigawatts in seventeen months implies a deployment pace that no company has ever maintained at this scale. The promise of 99% entirely depends on this execution, not just a simple announcement on X. The bet illustrates a broader shift than that of a single company. In the current race, computing infrastructure sometimes becomes more profitable than the product it was originally supposed to support, and SpaceX offers an almost caricatural demonstration of this. Nvidia will publish its own results on August 26, with an eye on confirming or not this massive allocation of GPUs promised by Musk.

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