Musk warned that “more than 200 new cloud vendors will die out,” but SpaceX (SPCX.US) itself is betting one-third of its revenue on a cancelable contract

The Zhitong Finance App learned that when the AI sector experienced a fierce sell-off in late October, a regular disclosure document from Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX.US) brought a structural rift covered by rapid growth into the spotlight.

Last week, SpaceX revealed in a document that about 34.5% of the company's revenue for the third quarter of 2026 came from a single customer, and that customer was only marked as “customer B” in the document. According to confirmation from people familiar with the matter, “Client B” is the AI lab Anthropic PBC. This means that the biggest source of revenue for this industrial giant, which started in the rocket and satellite business, is now not the US federal government, but an AI startup that has only been established for a few years — and this customer's contract structure has an exit valve that SpaceX can hardly control.

An Anthropic representative declined to comment, while a SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

The time the news was revealed coincided with a wave of sell-off that began when Wall Street's confidence in the “New Cloud Vendor” business model collapsed at the fastest rate in years. Since October, the stock prices of AI computing power leasers such as CoreWeave (CRWV.US), Nebius (NBIS.US), and IREN (IREN.US) have generally fallen sharply. The trigger for the sell-off was that CoreWeave's five-year credit default swap spread climbed to a level commonly viewed as a sign of financial distress, and its bond yields soared at the same time, causing investors to fundamentally doubt the entire sector's cycle of “using debt to drive computing power expansion and then using computing power to repay debt with rent.”

However, as cloud giants such as Alphabet (GOOGL.US) and Amazon (AMZN.US) successively announced capital expenditure exceeding expectations and free cash flow that changed from positive to negative, the market's doubts about whether huge AI expenses can continue and be converted into full returns have further intensified.

Nevertheless, Musk himself was one of the harshest speakers of this round of warnings. He wrote on his social networking platform X: “The debt market has closed financing channels for almost all companies that lack substantial revenue outside of AI data centers,” and “this means that more than 200 new cloud vendors will die and integrate at the level of a small fish.”

However, Musk's strict diagnosis of industry competitors is in intriguing contrast to the risks faced by his own most valuable asset. SpaceX does own Starlink subscription revenue and rocket launch revenue, which distinguishes it from pure computing power leasing companies in terms of cash flow structure. But it is the business line that supports its current highest growth narrative — the Super Intelligence (SI) computing power leasing division — showing characteristics highly similar to the “vulnerable new cloud vendors” Musk warned of: revenue is highly concentrated on a small number of customers, and core contracts are not locked in.

According to information, the third quarter of 2026 is SpaceX's second quarterly report since its listing, and it is also the first quarter where it has achieved overall profit. Revenue was US$14.6 billion, up 161% year on year; net profit was US$4.4 billion, compared with net loss of approximately US$1.1 billion in the same period last year. Structurally, the SI division's revenue was nearly 7.6 billion US dollars, an increase of 830% over the previous year, accounting for 52% of total revenue. For the first time, it surpassed Starlink to become the largest source of revenue. The division achieved operating profit of US$431 million for the quarter and an operating loss of US$1,257 million in the second quarter. The speed and magnitude of this transformation is enough to explain why the market once showed an increase of more than 10% after the earnings report was released.

However, a jump in the income statement does not automatically translate into an increase in the quality of revenue. The scale of SpaceX's dependence on Anthropic itself has formed a significant single point of exposure: 34.5% of quarterly revenue, more than double the 16.6% share of US federal government-related business.

Furthermore, the structure of contractual rights and obligations is particularly alarming. Anthropic promised in the IPO disclosure document that SpaceX will pay a maximum of US$12.5 billion during the contract period up to 2029, with an average monthly average of about US$3.1 billion from December 2026. However, the contract allows Anthropic to cancel with 90 days' notice after January 2027 and March 2027, respectively.

In contrast, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft (MSFT.US) hold Anthropic's non-cancellable minimum spending commitments of at least $114.5 billion, $110 billion, and $44.9 billion, respectively. This means that the revenue stream SpaceX received from Anthropic is far less stable than the promises received by its leading technology peers in the sense of contract design. A total contract amount of up to $120.5 billion, under the erosion of “cancellable” clauses, its valuation anchoring effect needs to be drastically discounted. What SpaceX is facing is a customer relationship that is formally sizable and can essentially be repriced at any time.

The macro context of this fragility is becoming increasingly unfavorable. In fact, the core concern of the AI computing power leasing industry is not insufficient demand — Nvidia (NVDA.US) CEO Huang Renxun still insisted that demand “exploded” at the Berlin GTC, and Nebius and IREN executives also emphasized that the number of customer inquiries is several times greater than the production capacity that can be launched. The real constraint is on the capital supply side: when the debt market tightens financing for computing power traders that lack independent revenue, relies on external capital to build data centers on a rolling basis, and then uses rental income to cover capital costs, its sustainability depends on an extremely narrow condition — the stability and predictability of rental cash flow must be sufficient to convince creditors.

Under this framework, the effectiveness of a contract that allows core clients to exit without cost within 90 days as a support to the financing narrative is highly questionable. Musk's argument that distinguishes SpaceX from “more than 200 new cloud vendors” is that Starlink and the launch business provided “considerable revenue independent of AI data centers.” This argument is founded at the group level, but at the departmental level, its persuasiveness will be greatly reduced: if Anthropic exercises the right to exit in early 2027, more than one-third of its revenue base will be greatly affected within one to two quarters, and the SI division is the business unit that currently has the fastest growth rate, the most significant improvement in profit margins, and carries the highest valuation imagination.

SpaceX's capital expenditure trajectory is also draining its fault-tolerant space at a faster rate. Capital expenditure for the third quarter was 19.6 billion US dollars, up 185% year over year, of which 16.4 billion US dollars were invested in super-smart infrastructure; the CFO indicates that capital expenditure for the fourth quarter will reach 35 billion to 40 billion US dollars.

Looking at it over a longer period of time, SpaceX's revenue structure has been almost fractured in less than a year. In an era where the US federal government has been the largest single customer for a long time, SpaceX's revenue risk is scattered, predictable, and linked to the stability of the national security budget. Today, 34.5% of revenue comes from an AI lab's computing power leasing decision, and the lab itself is also promoting an IPO and facing its own capital constraints and supplier diversification strategy — Anthropic also has agreements with other new cloud vendors such as Nscale and Lambda.

This means SpaceX is no longer an irreplaceable infrastructure partner, but an option continuously evaluated on commercial terms within Anthropic's supplier portfolio. Musk predicts that NASA's share of SpaceX's revenue will fall to less than 5% in 2026. If this prediction comes true, it will further accelerate the shift of SpaceX's revenue base from institutional, multi-year contracts to commercial, short-term contracts.

The migration itself isn't negative; it reflects a real explosion in AI computing power demand and SpaceX's ability to capture that demand. However, the mismatch between the speed of migration and the lack of contract protection mechanisms forms a gap under the current valuation framework that has not yet been fully priced.