• Elon Musk has had a rocky relationship with advertisers since acquiring Twitter in 2022.
• Musk's X sued advertisers for allegedly violating antitrust law by boycotting the app.
• New SEC filings show that X's efforts to win back advertisers haven't led to a bonanza.

Elon Musk's attempts to win over advertisers have yet to spark a major recovery in ad revenue for X.

In 2025, ad revenue for X (formerly Twitter) reached $1.8 billion, up around 7% from 2024. That said, revenue was down 21% from 2023 and about 59% from 2021, the year before Musk took over Twitter and began alienating some brands with looser content moderation.

Here were the stats:

X's ad revenue figures were revealed in an S-1 filing by SpaceX, X's parent company.

Since buying Twitter, Musk's relationship with advertisers has been rocky.

In 2023, he told marketers who were skipping out on X ads that they could "go fuck yourself."

Musk hired an ad industry veteran, Linda Yaccarino, in 2023 to help woo marketers. Yaccarino previously ran ad sales at NBCUniversal.

The drama with the ad industry didn't stop, though.

A year later, X sued an advertising trade group, The World Federation of Advertisers, and some members, including CVS, Unilever, and Mars, alleging they violated antitrust law by collectively withholding ad spend. A judge later tossed out the suit, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state a claim under the antitrust laws.

Yaccarino left the company in July 2025.

Last year, there was industry chatter that Musk's entry into politics may have helped X's ad prospects. As Musk took on a high-profile role in the US government, some advertisers began spending on X again. Ad industry insiders previously told Business Insider that they felt buying ads on the app had become a cost of doing business to appease Musk and his allies in President Donald Trump's White House. Musk left his role, and his relationship with the Trump administration has since become more muddled.

Advertising's centrality as a revenue source for X diminished in March 2025 after Musk decided to merge the app into his artificial intelligence company, xAI. The company's AI revenue is growing much faster than its advertising revenue, reaching around $1.35 billion in 2025, a 52% increase from the previous year.

With the decision to merge xAI into SpaceX earlier this year, advertising now accounts for just a fraction of the combined company's $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue.

That doesn't mean X has stopped trying to improve its ad products.

Last month, X announced it had revamped its ads business to integrate more AI tools. This month, X rolled out a new tool that uses AI to connect brands with creators that might be a good fit for their campaigns.

• Arm announced its own AI chip, the AGI CPU, and is partnering with OpenAI and Meta.
• The new Arm AGI CPU aims to address energy efficiency and memory constraints in AI data centers.
• Despite strong growth prospects, Arm faces competition from established players like Nvidia and AMD.

Arm has long run its business as an architect behind the scenes, designing chips that power almost all the world's smartphone and making money off royalties from the chips it designs for customers.

Now, Arm is changing it up by announcing its own AI chip, the Arm AGI CPU.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said Tuesday at a company conference that this massive pivot wasn't just an internal strategy shift—it was a direct plea from the world's most powerful AI giants. The company name-dropped OpenAI and Meta as major partners for this chip.

"The biggest reason we're doing this is that our partners have asked for it," Haas said Tuesday.

With energy constraints and memory shortages, the AI boom has created a massive bottleneck in data centers. Faced with this demand, Arm stepped up with an AI chip that it says is more energy-efficient. Arm says it sees a $1.5 trillion market opportunity as it moves into AI chips for cloud, edge, and physical AI.

Arm stock was up by more than 18% on Wednesday. Mizuho analysts wrote that they see "strong growth opportunities" for Arm in AI infrastructure and the automotive industry. Bank of America research analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note to investors that the company's outlook could be "too ambitious."

Meta and OpenAI partner with Arm

Meta has been building out data centers at a massive scale to power its apps and its latest superintelligence ventures. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said Tuesday onstage that its coming "Hyperion" cluster could draw 5 gigawatts of power, enough to power 50 towns the size of Palo Alto.

"If we met the performance, we couldn't get the power. If we got the power, we wouldn't get the performance," Janardhan said.

This sparked an engineering project within Meta, where engineers were "working 'round the clock" to port its systems to Arm in three months, said Paul Saab, a Meta engineer.

"I didn't even ask my boss here for permission to buy these machines or even start the project," Saab said onstage.

While Saab says he saw major performance benefits, at the time, there wasn't an Arm chip available to buy.

OpenAI faced a similar problem. Its compute demand has grown massively as it trains and runs its ChatGPT models, its AI coding tool Codex, and more.

"That is one of the most common things I hear inside OpenAI. I need more compute," Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for science, said onstage, adding that it needed chips that were energy-efficient.

Arm said it expects this chip to generate $15 billion in revenue by fiscal 2031.

The chip market is 'getting very crowded'

Arm faces the risk that the CPU market is "getting very crowded," Arya wrote in his analyst note. Other competitors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, have more CPU products and more established customers. Notably, both Meta and OpenAI also work with AMD and Nvidia, which could leave "limited" opportunity for Arm's new CPU, Arya wrote.

"Moreover, the bigger AI grows, the more pressure ARM's smartphone/consumer markets would have from limited memory supplies," Arya wrote.

That said, the increasing demand has led many customers to turn to chip companies beyond Nvidia for their computing needs. Both Meta and OpenAI also work with Broadcom to build AI chips.

The rise of AI agents has also led to greater demand for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions and make predictions. While Nvidia's core AI chips, the GPUs, dominate AI training, CPUs like Arm's AGI CPU can also help with inference. Nvidia also recently made moves into this market.

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