$6.4 billion. That's what xAI burned through in 2025, according to financial disclosures embedded in SpaceX's IPO filing — giving the public its first real look at how Elon Musk's AI company actually spends money.
The figures surfaced because of overlapping ownership structures between SpaceX and xAI. As a private company, xAI had no prior obligation to disclose its financials. TechCrunch reported the details Tuesday. The $6.4B annual loss puts xAI in the same spending tier as OpenAI, which has posted comparable losses as it builds out data center capacity and frontier model training.
The filing also signals this isn't a company tightening its belt. xAI is planning a significant expansion of Grok — the AI assistant built into X — with continued heavy infrastructure investment. The company appears to be treating 2025's losses as the cost of establishing compute infrastructure, not a crisis requiring correction.
Where the Money Is Going
Building and running large AI models is extraordinarily expensive. Training a frontier model requires thousands of specialized chips running for months; serving millions of user queries then requires even more hardware running continuously. xAI built out its Memphis data center, called Colossus, at a reported scale of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs — that kind of buildout alone costs billions before a single user interaction.
xAI raised $6 billion in a 2024 Series C funding round at a reported $50 billion valuation. The 2025 loss figure suggests a significant portion of that capital has been deployed. Future runway depends heavily on new fundraising, Grok subscription revenue through X Premium, or the continued financial relationship with SpaceX.
For X Premium subscribers who use Grok daily, the burn rate helps explain the product's rapid feature rollout pace. Companies spending at this clip prioritize shipping over profitability. The harder question is what happens if xAI needs to raise again in a market that's become more skeptical of AI companies without a clear path to positive cash flow.