SpaceX reported $7.81 billion in Q2 revenue on Tuesday, beating Wall Street’s $6.93 billion estimate and nearly doubling the $4.1 billion it booked in the year-ago period. The stock fell roughly 8% after hours. That gap, between a 92% revenue beat and a market that punished the print, is the story of SpaceX’s first quarter as a public company.

The bear case sits in the capex line. SpaceX spent $18.37 billion on capital expenditures in the quarter, just below the $18.58 billion analysts had modeled, but $15.8 billion of that went to AI infrastructure alone, more than double the $7.7 billion it spent on AI in Q1. Elon Musk told shareholders the company plans to build its AI data centers exclusively on Nvidia chips, and expects to be operating over 2 gigawatts of compute by the end of 2026 and closer to 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.

CFO Bret Johnsen framed the numbers as vindication. “Revenue growth accelerated across all our business segments and we delivered strong operating leverage, with significant margin expansion led by our new AI compute agreements,” he said in the release. He told analysts the company is on pace to hit $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by year-end, and disclosed that SpaceX had already contracted an additional $6.7 billion in cloud services revenue in the first few weeks of the current quarter, ramping from October.

The net loss narrowed to $541 million from $1 billion a year ago. That’s real progress. It’s also being spent, several times over, in the same quarter.

Investors have priors. The stock closed Monday at $114.53, down 15% from its IPO price and 49% off its June 16 high, erasing more than $1 trillion in market value. Thursday’s lockup expiration will release up to 20% of shares into that tape.

The Starmind AI-1 satellite, co-designed with Nvidia and carrying Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs for what SpaceX calls “datacenter class space compute,” is the product embodiment of the pivot. Whether the compute strategy is a durable second business or an $18-billion-a-quarter bet on an AI cycle it doesn’t control is the question the lockup tape will now answer in real time.

Sources