SpaceX Stock Slides as AI Spending Surges to $18.4B

SpaceX just delivered its first earnings report as a public company, and the numbers told two very different stories at once. Revenue beat expectations, jumping 92% year over year, but shares still tumbled after capital expenditures soared sixfold to $18.4 billion in the second quarter, more than double total quarterly sales, according to CNBC's reporting on the results. The figure blew past the $13.22 billion average analyst estimate compiled by FactSet.

The scale of the AI-specific spending is what actually spooked investors. Capital expenditures tied specifically to xAI, which runs the Grok AI service, hit $15.8 billion, well above the $13.09 billion analysts expected and roughly double the previous quarter's AI spend, according to Bloomberg data cited by NBC News. Over 80% of SpaceX's total capital expenditure this quarter went toward artificial intelligence, an area where the company remains behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on models and services, even as it tries to compete against Microsoft, Amazon, and Google's cloud divisions by selling its own compute capacity, this connects directly to our earlier coverage of SpaceX's AI business being valued near zero by Morgan Stanley just weeks ago.

The underlying business performance wasn't weak by any measure. SpaceX's AI segment generated $2.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, more than tripling from a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA for the segment swung from a $609 million loss to a $1.1 billion profit, according to Yahoo Finance's reporting on the results. Still, the company spent nearly $16 billion on AI infrastructure during the quarter alone, more than six times the segment's own revenue.

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen tried to reassure investors directly on the earnings call. "We have been very efficient, to date and I think we'll continue to be," he said. "On the AI compute side, we're able to deploy capital in such a way that we're getting less than a one-year payback," according to CNBC's reporting on his comments. SpaceX has already locked in major compute customers, including a deal with Google worth up to $920 million a month and a separate agreement with Anthropic worth up to $1.25 billion a month for three years at SpaceX's Colossus data center in Memphis.

CEO Elon Musk used the earnings call to accelerate his own long-term revenue target, saying SpaceX would hit $1 trillion in annual revenue in 2030, a year earlier than his previous 2031 forecast, according to Fortune's reporting on the call. Melissa Otto, global head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, offered a more measured read on the market's reaction: "The stock is down because the capex for the AI segment was more than double what was expected."

The reaction mirrors a genuine divide playing out across this entire earnings season. The same capex-versus-revenue tension punished Alphabet and Tesla earlier this quarter, while Microsoft and Amazon were rewarded for accelerating revenue growth and posting strong backlog numbers alongside their own AI spending increases, a distinction we covered in detail in our earlier reporting on Tesla and Alphabet's earnings-driven selloff.

SpaceX's earnings reaction reinforces a pattern that's become unmistakable across this entire AI infrastructure earnings season: markets are no longer rewarding AI capital expenditure on faith alone. Investors are now demanding clear evidence that spending converts to revenue on a reasonable timeline, and companies that can't demonstrate that conversion clearly are being punished regardless of how strong their underlying growth numbers look.

For businesses evaluating AI infrastructure partners, SpaceX's emerging position as a compute seller to Google and Anthropic is worth watching as a genuine new entrant in the cloud AI compute market, even as its own stock reflects real investor skepticism about the pace of its spending.

SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company beat revenue expectations with 92% year-over-year growth, but shares fell after AI-related capital expenditure jumped sixfold to $18.4 billion, more than double what analysts expected. The company's AI segment revenue more than tripled to $2.6 billion and swung to a $1.1 billion adjusted profit, but SpaceX spent nearly six times that amount on AI infrastructure during the same quarter. CEO Elon Musk moved up his $1 trillion annual revenue target to 2030, while CFO Bret Johnsen defended the spending as achieving under a one-year payback.