SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X
SpaceX is barely Space and mostly X
SpaceX：名不副实的“太空”公司，实则主攻“X”
Elon Musk’s exploding rockets are a front for the real moneymakers. 埃隆·马斯克的爆炸火箭只是其真正摇钱树的幌子。
Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk’s healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we’re calling the whole thing SpaceX. 曾经，我对埃隆·马斯克旗下最健康的公司 SpaceX 为何要收购其最病态的公司 xAI 存有疑问。现在，我更想问的是，为什么我们还要把整个公司统称为 SpaceX。
Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings statement as a public company. The space sector of the business didn’t break a billion dollars this quarter and contributed only a touch over 10 percent of the company’s revenue. SpaceX remains its own biggest customer. There just aren’t enough other people who want its rockets. And, I dunno, maybe if the rockets were a primary focus of the company, SpaceX wouldn’t be in danger of blasting a new crater into the Moon with its space trash. 看看 SpaceX 作为上市公司发布的首份季度财报，从营收来看，它本质上是一家电信公司和一家算力租赁公司。本季度，其太空业务板块的营收甚至没能突破 10 亿美元，仅占公司总营收的 10% 多一点。SpaceX 依然是自己最大的客户，因为市场上并没有足够多的人需要它的火箭。而且，我不知道，如果火箭真是公司的核心业务，SpaceX 或许就不会面临因太空垃圾而在月球上撞出新陨石坑的风险了。
The telecom part — SpaceX calls it “connectivity” — is Starlink, the satellite internet service, which had $4.2 billion in revenue, and was the only part of SpaceX that did not have a loss from operations. And while Gwynne Shotwell, on the call, outlined plans for a phone service meant to compete with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, the lion’s share of the spending (and the hype) is nonetheless around what is graciously being referred to as “AI” to capture whatever contributions Grok may be making. Analyst Alexander Potter expects spending on the neocloud business, which leases data center capacity to AI companies, to climb to $65 billion next year, $17 billion more than he’d previously estimated, Bloomberg notes. 电信业务——SpaceX 将其称为“连接”业务——即卫星互联网服务 Starlink，该业务营收达 42 亿美元，也是 SpaceX 唯一实现运营盈利的板块。尽管格温·肖特维尔（Gwynne Shotwell）在财报电话会议上概述了旨在与 AT&T、Verizon 和 T-Mobile 竞争的电话服务计划，但绝大部分支出（以及炒作热点）依然围绕着被美其名曰“AI”的领域，以期涵盖 Grok 可能带来的任何贡献。据彭博社报道，分析师亚历山大·波特（Alexander Potter）预计，向 AI 公司出租数据中心容量的“新云”（neocloud）业务支出明年将攀升至 650 亿美元，比他之前的估计高出 170 亿美元。
It was hard to miss how important leasing data center space was to SpaceX. Not only did it make more money than SpaceX’s rockets, it also drove more spending — $15.8 billion on AI alone in the second quarter. (By comparison, spending on the space and connectivity sectors was a touch over a billion each.) That business makes it a competitor with neocloud companies such as CoreWeave and Nebius. 显而易见，租赁数据中心空间对 SpaceX 至关重要。它不仅比火箭业务赚得更多，还带动了更多的支出——仅第二季度在 AI 上的投入就高达 158 亿美元。（相比之下，太空和连接业务的支出各仅略高于 10 亿美元。）这项业务使其成为了 CoreWeave 和 Nebius 等“新云”公司的竞争对手。
Except that wasn’t originally the plan. 但最初的计划并非如此。
Musk built SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis for Grok, his also-ran AI that also occasionally refers to itself as MechaHitler and has a penchant for undressing women and children without their consent. But xAI had trouble running the complex, and decided to rent it out instead. In addition to encountering latency that made it hard to train in-house models, the center employed a mix of newer and older chips that created bottlenecks. On the earnings call, Musk said that only 10 percent of the compute SpaceX builds will go to Grok. 马斯克在孟菲斯为 Grok 建造了 SpaceX 的 Colossus 1 数据中心。Grok 是他那款平庸的 AI 产品，有时自称为“机械希特勒”（MechaHitler），且有未经同意就给女性和儿童“脱衣”的恶习。但 xAI 在运营该中心时遇到了困难，于是决定将其出租。除了因延迟问题导致难以训练内部模型外，该中心混合使用新旧芯片也造成了瓶颈。在财报电话会议上，马斯克表示，SpaceX 构建的算力中只有 10% 会提供给 Grok。
SpaceX now has deals with Google, Anthropic, Reflection AI, and Cursor, an AI company Musk eventually chose to acquire. On the second quarter earnings call, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said those deals put the company “on a trajectory, including contribution from Cursor, to reach $100 billion of ARR, or annualized revenue run rate,” a financial measurement used to estimate how much money a company will receive in a year, based on an estimate from a shorter period of time. Musk was even more bullish, saying that “the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark,” and that the actual ARR might be higher. SpaceX 目前已与谷歌、Anthropic、Reflection AI 以及马斯克最终决定收购的 AI 公司 Cursor 达成协议。在第二季度财报电话会议上，SpaceX 首席财务官布雷特·约翰森（Bret Johnsen）表示，这些交易使公司“处于实现 1000 亿美元 ARR（年度经常性收入）的轨道上，其中包括 Cursor 的贡献”。ARR 是一种财务指标，用于根据较短时间段的估算来预测公司一年的收入。马斯克则更为乐观，称“12 月实现 1000 亿美元 ARR 毫无悬念”，甚至实际 ARR 可能会更高。
That’s very nice. But revenue isn’t profit, and building data centers is expensive. 这听起来很不错。但营收不等于利润，建设数据中心成本高昂。
There are some problems with being in the bare-metal business of renting out compute — specifically, inevitable obsolescence, the vagaries of construction, and the fact that compute is basically a commodity, which means that companies compete on cost. The more data centers that get built, the more compute is available. With more compute available, companies can’t charge as much for their chips. 从事出租算力的“裸机”业务存在一些问题——特别是不可避免的设备过时、建设过程的不确定性，以及算力本质上是一种大宗商品的事实，这意味着公司必须在成本上展开竞争。数据中心建得越多，可用的算力就越多。随着算力供应增加，公司就无法为芯片收取高价。
Musk has claimed that he took SpaceX public because he wanted to build data centers in space. Now, I might think that if I had trouble running a data center on the ground, I’d get better at it before I tried to do something an order of magnitude harder — something that had never been done before, even. But that is not how Musk thinks, I suppose. 马斯克曾声称，他让 SpaceX 上市是因为他想在太空中建造数据中心。如果是我，在地面上运营数据中心都感到吃力的话，我会先提升自己的能力，再去尝试做一件难度高出一个数量级、甚至前所未有的事情。但我想，马斯克的思维方式并非如此。
SpaceX has even proposed an orbital data center consisting of as many as 1 million satellites to the Federal Communications Commission. The application is light on technical details — we have no idea about satellite size or deployment schedule, for instance — which makes me think that it’s more for PR than anything else. Musk has also released a few details about the satellites — or, at least, some drawings of them. In this vision, a Musk-owned chip producer called Terafab will produce one terawatt of chips every year. A billion Optimus robots will do the work, at least once Musk figures out hands. SpaceX 甚至向美国联邦通信委员会（FCC）提议建设一个由多达 100 万颗卫星组成的轨道数据中心。该申请缺乏技术细节——例如，我们对卫星的尺寸或部署时间表一无所知——这让我觉得这更多是为了公关宣传。马斯克还发布了一些关于这些卫星的细节，或者至少是一些设计图。在这一愿景中，一家名为 Terafab 的马斯克旗下芯片制造商每年将生产 1 太瓦（terawatt）的芯片。十亿台擎天柱（Optimus）机器人将负责完成这些工作，前提是马斯克能先搞定机器人的手部设计。
This all sounds expensive, doesn’t it? The end goal, Musk claims, is to build a mass accelerator on the Moon. 这一切听起来都很昂贵，不是吗？马斯克声称，最终目标是在月球上建造一个质量加速器。
I don’t put much stock in this kind of thing, any more than I put much stock in Musk’s claims that Starlink will deliver “a majority of the world’s internet,” as he said on the earnings call. It’s all part and parcel of Musk’s general habit of talking about a sci-fi future as imagined by a bunch of mid-20th-century writers. 我并不看好这类事情，就像我并不相信马斯克在财报电话会议上所说的 Starlink 将提供“全球大部分互联网服务”一样。这完全是马斯克一贯的习惯，即谈论那些由 20 世纪中叶作家们所构想的科幻未来。