Key points
- New hosting deal adds about $1.11 billion in monthly revenue
- Revenue starts December 1
- SpaceX did not name the customer
- CFO reaffirms a $100 billion ARR target
SpaceX has signed another deal to host someone else's AI compute, and revenue starts on December 1. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen put the contract at about $1.11 billion a month, or roughly $13 billion annualized. He did not say who the customer is.
Johnsen was speaking Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. "We closed another hosting deal, and that translates into about $1.11 billion a month starting December 1st of this year, which is another roughly $13 billion of ARR that starts December 1st," he said.
That $13 billion is a run rate, not revenue SpaceX has already earned or a forecast of next year's sales. SpaceX uses ARR here to mean annualized revenue run rate. The calculation takes SpaceX's expected December revenue and multiplies it by twelve. Johnsen said SpaceX remains on track to reach $100 billion of ARR by year end "with annualizing our December number."
SpaceX has not disclosed the customer or the combined monthly revenue from all of its compute contracts. Johnsen did name two existing relationships for context. "We have a very strong relationship with Anthropic and Google, for example," he said.
The part investors should read twice
These compute contracts are short, though not as short as a single quarter. "Almost all of them, if not all of them, have been, in essence, 90-day with a 90-day out, so roughly six-month commits," Johnsen said, and he said the new deal carries the same structure and timeline. SpaceX says that supports a payback period of under a year on the hardware. "The risk related to these investments for us is dramatically less when we are in less than a one-year payback mode," he said. Even so, the contracts carry short initial commitments and 90-day termination provisions, and annualizing one month of revenue assumes that customers remain longer than the minimum contractual period.
The compute business is new enough that its shape keeps changing. SpaceX also plans to put compute in orbit alongside its terrestrial capacity, using the same satellite bus as Starlink broadband with different payloads, and Johnsen said the satellites are due to fly next year with service capability in the first half of 2028.
SPCX closed at $148.24 on Thursday, up 0.5%. The stock has been public since June, when SpaceX listed at a record $1.77 trillion valuation. The compute business now adds a third piece to the SpaceX story alongside rockets and Starlink broadband.
