xAI's $6.4B burn last year: SpaceX IPO filing reveals more to come

According to SpaceX's IPO filings, Elon Musk's xAI recorded operating losses of $6.4 billion in 2025 on revenue of just $3.2 billion, and these losses are expected to grow. The filing also reveals plans to scale Grok to "multiple trillions of parameters," a dramatic increase that will likely require significant additional computing expenditure.

In February, Elon Musk merged his AI company xAI—which had previously acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter)—with his rocket and satellite company SpaceX, then announced he would take the combined entity public this year. While AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also eyeing public debuts in 2026, SpaceX's IPO is expected to be one of the largest in history, with a potential valuation of $1.75 trillion.

This filing provides the first public glimpse into xAI's (and therefore X's) financials. In 2024, xAI recorded a loss of $1.56 billion on revenue of $2.62 billion. By 2025, losses had ballooned to $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion in revenue, widening the gap between earnings and spending. Meanwhile, competitor and customer Anthropic reportedly expects a 130% revenue jump to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, leading to its first operating profit.

The revenue increase from 2024 to 2025 was largely driven by "AI solutions and infrastructure revenue" totaling $465 million, which includes $365 million from X and Grok subscription revenue and $88 million from data licensing. An additional $116 million came from advertising.

AI segment capital expenditures rose from $12.7 billion in 2025 to $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, representing an annualized capex run rate of about $30.8 billion—more than doubling year over year.

So far, this investment has led to growing but still limited user numbers. According to the filing, SpaceX recorded 117 million monthly active users for Grok AI features as of March 2026, out of a total of 550 million MAUs across Grok and X combined. That means only about one-fifth of the combined ecosystem actively uses Grok AI features.

Nevertheless, SpaceX intends to continue developing Grok. Its next-generation AI is expected to scale to "multiple trillions of parameters," described in the filing as a "step change in reasoning depth and overall intelligence." This ambitious target is now documented in the audited records of the SEC.

This goal will undoubtedly require further investment. The SpaceX filing's "use of proceeds" section mentions an "expansion of our AI compute infrastructure." According to the filing, xAI's Colossus and Colossus II data centers—brought online in 122 and 91 days, respectively—collectively provide about 1 gigawatt of compute power, used for both training and inference of Grok. SpaceX claims that owning the compute infrastructure and vertically integrating across the AI stack allows them to "train and iterate frontier models at lower cost and higher velocity."

Another way SpaceX might ease investor concerns about spending is by performing training and inference in orbital data centers, which Musk has promised will be a much cheaper alternative to terrestrial data centers. That sci-fi vision is unlikely to materialize for several years, though. The filing states that SpaceX intends to begin deploying its orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028—the first concrete timeline set for such a launch.

"The future of AI will be determined by control of the physical stack," the filing reads.