AI rivals are thirsty for SpaceX's compute, Elon Musk says

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, stated during the company’s earnings call that artificial intelligence (AI) rivals are eagerly seeking to lease SpaceX’s compute resources. Musk explained that SpaceX plans to allocate a portion of its compute capacity for internal AI projects, such as scaling Grok, its AI chatbot, and Cursor, a coding startup recently acquired by the company.

The remaining compute will be rented out to external customers. Musk highlighted that if all inquiries were to be granted, SpaceX’s compute could be leased several times over. The company intends to adopt a dynamic approach, with the balance of internal and external use fluctuating from month to month. SpaceX anticipates that the value of compute will rise as AI models advance, producing more effective intelligence per watt of energy consumed.

Musk emphasized that this increased value will likely continue, suggesting that the demand for superior AI compute will persist for an extended period. The CEO likened this situation to Monty Python’s famous cheese shop sketch, where customers repeatedly request unavailable items. Musk also mentioned that SpaceX has attempted to offload some of its inference compute to other cloud providers to utilize more resources for training purposes.