SpaceX reported a 92 per cent year-over-year revenue increase to US$7.8 billion during its second quarter of 2026, marking its first earnings release as a publicly traded company. The space technology company narrowed its net loss to $541 million, an improvement of $467 million. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen stated that the company spent a whopping $15.8 billion of its $18.4 billion in total capital expenditures (CapEx) on AI infrastructure.
That spending is designed to support what the company said was a projected $100-billion annualized revenue run rate by December. An annualized revenue run rate takes a company’s current sales over a short period, such as a month of revenue, and multiplies that figure to forecast a full 12 months of future financial performance.
The company also stated that adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) was $3.5 billion, up 191% from $1.2 billion.
A public company, finally
The quarter capped a run of firsts for the 24-year-old company. SpaceX closed its initial public offering on June 15, selling just under 639 million Class A shares and raising approximately $85.7 billion in net proceeds. Shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX three days earlier. Less than two weeks after that, the company issued its first bonds: $25 billion in investment-grade notes split across five maturities running from 2031 to 2056, priced at a weighted average interest rate of 5.855%. Part of that money went toward paying off a $20-billion bridge loan the company had taken out earlier in the year.
The combined effect left SpaceX with $100 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand at quarter’s end, plus $47.5 billion in signed but not-yet-recognized contracts, known as backlog. It’s a large cushion for a company that also posted a net loss for the quarter. The company says this is deliberate, funding three capital-intensive bets at once: Starship, next-generation Starlink satellites, and AI computing infrastructure.
Connectivity is carrying the business
SpaceX now organizes its financial reporting into three segments: Space (rockets and launch services), Connectivity (Starlink), and AI (Grok and related compute). Of the three, Connectivity is by far the most profitable, generating $4.3 billion in revenue, up 66 per cent from a year earlier, and $2.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA.
The growth was driven by Starlink subscribers, which doubled year-over-year to 12 million, including a record 1.7 million new customers added in the quarter alone. The company held average revenue per user – what it charges each customer, on average, per month – steady at $66, even as it expanded into new international markets that typically pay less.
The growth is being fuelled in part from enterprise and government customers including airlines. SpaceX signed a major deal with American Airlines during the quarter and activated service on Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus, while also picking up more than $6 billion in U.S. government contracts for Starshield, a secure version of Starlink built for military and national security use. President and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell told analysts on the earnings call that SpaceX has “never lost an enterprise customer,” and that the company remains less than 10 per cent penetrated in the aviation market.
Rockets are still losing money
The Space segment, which covers Falcon 9 and Starship launches, grew revenue 29 per cent year-over-year to $962 million, but its losses actually widened, with adjusted EBITDA falling to a loss of $205 million. The company said that’s a direct result of pouring more money into Starship research and development which SpaceX says will eventually cut the cost of reaching orbit dramatically compared to Falcon 9.
That bet appears to be paying off technically, if not yet financially. SpaceX flew two Starship test missions in the past 90 days: Flight 12 in May and Flight 13 in July, the latter completed just after the quarter closed. On the earnings call, Elon Musk said the ship’s heat shield, long the hardest unsolved engineering problem on the vehicle, is now “solved,” based on data and a visual inspection of the ship, which splashed down intact and is being recovered from the ocean for further analysis.
The next test, Flight 14, tentatively scheduled for the end of August pending regulatory approval, is a bigger step: it will be SpaceX’s first attempt to catch the ship with the launch tower, and the first flight to deliver Starlink V3 satellites into their operational orbit rather than a test deployment. That matters beyond the rocket program itself as V3 satellites carry roughly ten times the capacity of the current generation, and SpaceX is counting on them to drive the next leg of Starlink’s revenue growth.
Has AI turned a corner?
The AI segment, which includes Grok, X’s advertising business, and the compute infrastructure SpaceX rents out to other companies, posted the fastest growth of the three: revenue nearly tripled sequentially to $2.6 billion, up 247 per cent year-over-year. More notably, it turned adjusted EBITDA-positive for the first time, at $1.1 billion, a sharp reversal from the $609-million loss the segment posted just one quarter earlier.
The shift was driven by new cloud computing contracts with $14.1 billion worth signed during the quarter, giving customers access to SpaceX’s Colossus data centres and growing subscription revenue from Grok and X. SpaceX also announced a $60-billion deal to acquire Cursor, an AI coding tool, expected to close in the third quarter. Grok 4.5, released in July after the quarter ended and developed alongside the Cursor team, is described by the company as its most capable model yet.
Nearly all of the segment’s spending shows up on the CapEx line: SpaceX put $15.8 billion of its $18.4-billion quarterly capital budget into AI infrastructure alone, expanding its compute capacity to 1.4 gigawatts, up from 1.0 gigawatt in the first quarter. The company said it’s targeting more than 2 gigawatts by the end of the year.
What’s next
Along with the $100 billion in annualized revenue run previously mentioned, a figure Musk said the company would hit “even if we did nothing” beyond contracts already signed, the company also moved up its internal target for reaching $1 trillion in annual revenue by a year, from 2031 to 2030, citing the anticipated ramp from V3 Starlink satellites and continued momentum in AI compute deals.
For a company that spent 24 years as a private business, the quarter offered the first real look at how the pieces of the company fit together financially, and how much of a bet SpaceX is still making on Starship and AI to fund the next stage of growth. The market responded to the earnings with the stock trending downward, near its all time low as of publication.