SpaceX Is Now an AI Company That Also Launches Rockets

SpaceX did something Tuesday it had never done before: report earnings as a public company. And the first report card was a strange one. Revenue nearly doubled, the loss shrank by almost half, every segment beat what Wall Street expected, and the stock still fell as much as 11 percent after hours.

I've written about Elon and the AGI race on here twice now, and both times I was working off the same problem everyone else had: SpaceX was private, so nobody outside the company could see the actual numbers. That ended Tuesday. Here is what the first public numbers actually say.

The headline numbers

Per CNBC's coverage of the report, SpaceX brought in $7.81 billion in the April through June quarter, up 92 percent from $4.1 billion a year earlier and well above the roughly $6.9 billion analysts expected. The net loss narrowed to $541 million, down from $1 billion in the same quarter last year. Loss per share came in at 9 cents against an expected 26 cents.

A beat on every line. And yet the stock, which had jumped 9.4 percent during the regular session, gave it all back and then some once investors saw the spending. More on that in a second.

Where the money actually comes from

This is the part I found genuinely interesting, because SpaceX breaks its business into three segments now, and they could not be more different.

Connectivity, which is basically Starlink, did $4.29 billion in revenue and posted $1.66 billion in operating income, up 79 percent, per CNBC's breakdown of the numbers. Starlink doubled its subscriber base to 12 million people, per Reuters' reporting carried by CNA. This is the only part of SpaceX that makes money, and it is quietly becoming a phone company too. President Gwynne Shotwell told analysts SpaceX plans to take "quite a few" customers from T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon and build "a true mobile service." Telecom stocks dropped after hours on that alone.

Space, the actual rocket business the company is named after, did $962 million in revenue and lost $542 million on an operating basis. Let that sink in. The rockets lose money.

AI did $2.56 billion in revenue, up about 250 percent from a year ago, and lost $1.26 billion. This is the old xAI, which merged into SpaceX back in February, plus a fast-growing business of renting out computing power. Per CFO Bret Johnsen on the call, the customers leasing that compute include Anthropic, Google, and a startup called Reflection AI.

That last one landed close to home for me. I use Claude every day. The company behind it is now literally renting computer power from SpaceX, and on the call Musk went out of his way to praise Anthropic, saying the Claude 4.5 rollout should be "considered one of the milestones" in the AI industry, per Business Insider's live blog of the call. The AGI race is apparently civil enough that one contender rents servers from another and compliments its work on an earnings call.

The bill that spooked Wall Street

Here is why the stock fell. Total capital spending hit $18.37 billion for the quarter, up from $2.83 billion a year earlier, and $15.8 billion of it went to AI infrastructure, per Business Insider. Analysts had penciled in about $13.1 billion for the AI part. Johnsen told investors to expect similar spending for at least the next couple of quarters.

To put $15.8 billion in one quarter in normal-person terms: that is more than the entire company spent on everything, rockets included, in most years of its existence. What it's buying, per Musk on the call, is compute capacity. SpaceX ended the quarter with 1.4 gigawatts of compute online, up from 400 megawatts a year ago, targeting more than 2 gigawatts by the end of this year and something closer to 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, per Data Center Dynamics' coverage.

The company can afford the tab for now. It raised a record $86 billion in its June IPO, and per its own statement it ended the quarter sitting on $100 billion in cash and marketable securities with a $47.5 billion backlog. Johnsen also said another $6.7 billion in cloud services revenue is already under contract and starts ramping in October, per TechCrunch, and the company is projecting a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by December.

Nvidia won the week without doing anything

Buried in the call was a huge piece of chip news. Musk said SpaceX is going all in on one supplier: "We've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture... So we're exclusive to Nvidia." AMD shares fell more than 8 percent on that sentence alone, per NDTV Profit, despite AMD reporting a record quarter the same day.

The Nvidia gear is not just for data centers on the ground. SpaceX announced it's partnering with Nvidia to design the compute payload for Starmind AI1, the first satellite in a planned constellation that runs AI workloads in orbit, using Nvidia's Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, per Teslarati's reporting. SpaceX has filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites for this, and Musk said launches start next year.

Meanwhile, the rocket part keeps moving

Flight 14 of Starship could fly before the end of August, pending regulatory approval, per The Next Web. This one has two firsts attached: SpaceX will try to catch the returning upper stage with the launch tower's arms for the first time ever (the booster has been caught three times, the ship never has), and it will carry real V3 Starlink satellites to orbit instead of test payloads. Musk said the heat shield problem that plagued earlier flights is solved, his words with an "I don't want to jinx it" attached, and promised at least one flight a day within a year.

That cadence promise deserves context: Musk's schedules have a long history of slipping, a caveat The Next Web's own coverage included right next to the quote.

What happens Thursday

One last thing worth knowing if you follow the stock: the post-IPO lockup period expires Thursday, August 6, per Reuters and Business Insider. That's the date insiders and early investors are first allowed to sell shares. The stock was already trading below its $135 IPO price before earnings.

So that's the first public look inside SpaceX. A satellite internet company that makes real money, a rocket company that doesn't, and an AI landlord that just signed up two of the biggest labs on Earth as tenants. When I wrote that Elon might win the AGI race, I didn't have a balance sheet to point at. Now there's one, and it says the bet is costing about $16 billion a quarter.