SpaceX posted $7.8 billion in second-quarter revenue, a 92 percent jump from $4 billion a year earlier, driven by a compute-hosting pivot that the company only disclosed in the weeks before its record initial public offering. The rocket-turned-cloud vendor still lost $541 million on a GAAP basis, though the deficit narrowed from $1 billion in the same quarter last year.
The compute pivot shows up in the numbers
Nearly $2 billion of the year-over-year growth came from the AI division, which used to be Elon Musk's xAI startup before it was absorbed into SpaceX. Another $1.7 billion came from Starlink. CFO Bret Johnsen said the new hosting deals generated high incremental EBITDA margins as the company monetized available compute capacity built for xAI's own models.
The forward numbers are aggressive
Johnsen said SpaceX has $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue under contract over a six-month period that begins ramping in October. He also said that once the Cursor integration is complete, the company will reach a $100 billion annualized revenue run-rate by year end. Musk went further on the call, calling the December $100 billion ARR "not a question mark" and adding it would be achieved "if we basically did nothing."
The spending pace matches the rhetoric
Capital expenditures hit $28 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $7 billion in the same period last year. A post-IPO bond sale left the company with a $100 billion war chest. Full-year 2025 revenue was $18.67 billion, meaning the implied run-rate would require more than a fivefold increase in six months.
The market is not convinced
Shares closed at just over $125 on Tuesday, below the $135 IPO price reportedly set by Musk himself, and fell as much as 8 percent in after-hours trading. The stock briefly passed Amazon and nearly equaled Microsoft in the first days of trading before reversing. The compute deals with Anthropic and Google were announced in the weeks before the IPO, after xAI struggled to catch OpenAI and Anthropic while generating headlines for a chatbot that called itself MechaHitler and produced child sexual abuse material.