SpaceX Eyes Up to $1 Trillion Run Rate by 2027, Guides $33B to $37B in Q1

Image: SpaceX

Elon Musk says SpaceX could finish 2027 with annual recurring revenue somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion, and the company’s CFO followed with guidance of $33 billion to $37 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2027 alone.

That’s according to SpaceX’s Q3 earnings call on Tuesday, streamed as an official webcast on X. After walking through the company’s compute buildout and Grok Bot’s growth, Musk said, “In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX’s annual recurring revenue by the end of ’27 is somewhere between $500 billion and a trillion.” He then joked that he didn’t “want to give Bret a heart attack” before handing off to CFO Bret Johnsen.

Johnsen’s outlook covered a much shorter window, and he said SpaceX now sees “total company revenues in the range of $33 to $37 billion for Q1 of 2027,” which compares with the $14.6 billion SpaceX reported for the third quarter. He also said the cloud services business is on track for its previously stated goal of $100 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year, measured on December revenue, and that fourth-quarter capital expenditures should land between $35 billion and $40 billion.

President Gwynne Shotwell filled in more detail on Starlink‘s airline business. “Starlink is now contracted for roughly 12,000 planes, a quarter of the available aircraft,” she said, adding that SpaceX has quadrupled its aviation production rates since the start of the year and expects to double them again before year-end. SpaceX’s earnings update separately lists more than 3,800 aircraft already equipped with the service.

Shotwell also gave a new usage figure for Grok Bot, the agentic assistant SpaceX launched in August. She said it had 800,000 paid weekly users earlier this month, “more than doubling over the last month,” with businesses the fastest-growing group of customers. Musk said he has “never seen anything grow this fast” and that Grok Bot may end up using most of SpaceXSI’s compute.

On that compute, Musk said he has been spending as many as four days a week in Memphis getting the supercomputer cluster online. He said SpaceX is “tracking to be able to bring roughly 200,000 GB300s online per month for every month for the remainder of this year and continuing that pace next year,” with next year shifting mostly to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin hardware. He added that he’s fairly confident SpaceX can bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027, on top of the roughly 2.5 to 3 gigawatts expected by the end of this year.

Musk also shared the first timeline for Terafab‘s chips, with what he called “big error bars.” The internal goal is to make the first test chip, which he described as “kind of a SRAM chip” to test the line, functional “in approximately May or June of next year” at the research fab in Austin. The aspiration after that is to reach volume production around the third quarter of 2028 at the main Terafab site at Gibbons Creek. “These are very aggressive dates,” Musk said.

The guidance builds on a quarter that already marked a turning point. SpaceX reported $4.4 billion in net income on $14.6 billion in revenue for the third quarter, its first profitable quarter since going public in June, with Super Intelligence revenue of $7.6 billion. Getting to $33 billion to $37 billion by the first quarter of 2027 would more than double that quarterly revenue in about six months.

Do you think SpaceX can really hit $500 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027, or is that range too optimistic?