By Rajwa Quasim
Despite strong revenue growth, SpaceX shares fell sharply after the company’s second quarterly report, and the first earnings report as a public company was released. In premarket trading, the stock was down 12%. This drop is due to the heavy spending on AI and other services.
The revenue for the second quarter was about $7.8 billion, which is 92% up from a year earlier ($4.1 billion) exceeding the forecasts. The capital expenditure was about $18.4 billion in the second quarter, where huge spending was done for AI infrastructure. This is six times more than what it was a year earlier. Starlink revenue, which made up more than half of the total, has been increased by 66% from a year earlier and revenue from the company’s AI business jumped about 250% ($2.6 billion).
Overall, SpaceX reported a net loss of $143 million in the three months to June and a loss of $2 billion for the first half of the year.
READ: SpaceX unveils first earnings as public company after record IPO (August 4, 2026)
The investors are concerned about the company’s capital expenditure and question whether the huge spending will give the required profit in future.
“We’re building AI compute capacity at scale faster than anyone else, we believe, and we’re significantly improving our AI models,” Musk said on a post-earnings call.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said she expected SpaceX to snatch “quite a few” of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon customers with the Starlink business, and aims to build out ground-based infrastructure to complement its satellite network for “a true mobile service.”
Starlink remains one of the biggest revenue drivers even though the subscriber growth was slightly below the analysts forecast. This is due to projects with a wide range of customers, including government departments. There’s also a huge demand for its launch services.
READ: SpaceX IPO hype meets investor caution (June 8, 2026)
The company could also face pressure from a wave of insider and early investors’ shares in the market, as SpaceX’s post-IPO lock-up period will expire starting Thursday. The company began trading on the U.S. stock market in June. This could allow hundreds of millions of shares held by employees and investors to enter the market. According to the analysts, the volume of insider sales will be closely watched as an indicator of confidence in the company’s long-term outlook.
SpaceX closed at just over $125 on Tuesday, which is below their IPO price of $135. The highest value that the company hit was more than $200, shortly after the listing.
“SpaceX expects to have built more than two gigawatts of computing capacity this year and by the end of next year will have close to 10 gigawatts of computing,” Musk said. SpaceX also plans to use Nvidia produced hardware to build its data centers.