SpaceX has doubled its revenue, and the biggest engine wasn't rockets. In its first quarterly results since going public, the company said sales grew 92% from 4 billion dollars a year earlier to 7.8 billion dollars in the second quarter, helped by its Starlink satellite-internet service and by deals to rent out computing power to AI firms Anthropic and Google. Nearly 2 billion dollars of the growth came from its AI division, and Starlink added another 1.7 billion. The company still lost 541 million dollars in the quarter, but that was down from a 1 billion dollar loss a year earlier.
How a rocket company became an AI landlord
The AI arm has an unusual backstory. It used to be Musk's own startup, xAI, which was absorbed into SpaceX and had been struggling to catch leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX had already built two data centres near Memphis, Tennessee to train xAI's models, so it pivoted much of that capacity to rent out to customers instead. "The incremental revenue from new hosting deals generated high incremental EBITDA margins as we monetized available compute capacity," CFO Bret Johnsen said on a call. He pointed to another 6.7 billion dollars of cloud-services revenue already under contract, starting to ramp from October.
Big promises, cautious investors
The targets got bolder from there. Johnsen said that once SpaceX integrates the AI startup Cursor, it should hit a 100-billion-dollar annualised revenue run-rate by year-end, against 18.67 billion dollars in revenue for all of 2025. Musk went further, saying the 100-billion figure "is not a question mark" and would probably be higher, and projecting the company will eventually reach 1 trillion dollars in revenue. Investors were less sure. SpaceX has spent heavily, more than 28 billion dollars in capital spending in the first half, up from 7 billion a year earlier, and the shares, already below their 135-dollar IPO price, closed near 125 dollars and fell as much as 8% after hours.
SpaceX raised more than 85 billion dollars in the largest IPO in history, at a 1.75-trillion-dollar valuation. The first report card shows a business growing fast and burning cash just as fast, and a market still deciding what that's worth.
