SpaceX revenue doubles as AI losses and spending soar

SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company shows a business scaling rapidly — and spending even faster. Second-quarter revenue reached $7.8 billion, up 92% from $4 billion a year earlier, while spending surged more than 550% to $18.3 billion, according to BBC News.

TechCrunch reported that nearly $2 billion of the revenue increase came from SpaceX’s AI division, while Starlink contributed another $1.7 billion in growth. The AI gains were driven partly by agreements to rent computing capacity to Anthropic and Google, turning SpaceX into a direct competitor to neocloud providers such as CoreWeave.

SpaceX’s AI business is growing but losing money

The Verge reported a sharper view of the AI unit’s economics: AI revenue rose more than threefold to $2.6 billion, but the division lost $1.5 billion in the quarter. SpaceX identified AI as the source of most of its value in documents filed before its public listing.

That growth comes with substantial infrastructure costs. Capital expenditures reached $18.37 billion, as SpaceX builds out computing capacity alongside its space and satellite operations. The company’s overall quarterly loss narrowed to $143 million, according to The Verge, while BBC News reported a $2 billion net loss for the first six months of the year. Those figures cover different periods and are not directly comparable.

The results make SpaceX’s AI expansion look less like a profitable side business than a capital-intensive bet. Revenue is rising quickly, but the division’s reported quarterly loss was more than half of its quarterly sales.

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Starlink growth depends on Starship

Starlink remains the company’s only profitable business, according to The Verge, but its expansion depends on Starship. The launch vehicle must carry heavier versions of the satellites that underpin Starlink’s growth. SpaceX said it had already launched 20 of those satellites, though it did not say how close it was to the planned full deployment of 60 satellites at once.

Spending on space technology development also increased by $389 million from the previous year, with Starship the primary driver. That makes the rocket central not only to Elon Musk’s longer-term space ambitions but also to the profitable connectivity business supporting the company today. It also adds context to Musk’s claim that SpaceX could eventually outvalue Earth’s material assets.

Stock falls below the IPO price

SpaceX raised more than $85 billion in what TechCrunch described as the largest IPO in history, going public at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Its shares initially reached $176 in June, briefly pushing the company past Amazon and close to Microsoft by market value.

The enthusiasm has faded. SpaceX’s stock has traded below its $135 IPO price for several weeks. TechCrunch said shares closed at just over $125 on Tuesday before falling as much as 8% after hours, while BBC News reported a decline of nearly 9%.

SpaceX beat analyst estimates, according to Bloomberg as cited by The Verge, but the market reaction still turned negative. The numbers explain why: the company has found a fast-growing AI revenue stream, yet its compute expansion and Starship program are consuming tens of billions of dollars before that growth translates into sustained profitability.