level: business
elon musk's xai recorded a $6.4 billion operating loss on $3.2 billion revenue in 2025, according to spacex's ipo filing. the loss widened from $1.56 billion in 2024, even as revenue grew from $2.62 billion. the filing provides the first public look at xai's finances after its merger with spacex. revenue sources included $365 million from x and grok subscriptions, $88 million from data licensing, and $116 million from advertising.
spacex plans to scale grok to multiple trillions of parameters, calling it a step change in reasoning and intelligence. this will require significant compute expansion. ai capital expenditures hit $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, an annualized rate of about $30.8 billion, more than double the prior year. the colossus data centers provide roughly 1 gigawatt of power for training and inference. spacex claims vertical integration lowers costs and speeds iteration.
grok had 117 million monthly active users as of march 2026, out of 550 million total across grok and x. spacex also plans to deploy orbital ai compute satellites as early as 2028, aiming for cheaper alternatives to terrestrial data centers. the filing states control of the physical stack will determine ai's future. competitor anthropic expects a 130% revenue jump to $10.9 billion and its first operating profit in the second quarter.
why it matters: the filing reveals the extreme capital demands of frontier ai development and the widening gap between revenue and spending, highlighting risks for investors as ai companies eye public markets.