SpaceX's first earnings report since its record June IPO beat Wall Street's revenue forecasts, with sales up 92% and AI revenue more than tripling. Shares still fell as much as 8% in after-hours trading, extending a slide that has erased almost half the stock's value from its post-IPO peak.
Revenue jumps 92%, but shares slide again
SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company topped Wall Street's forecasts on Tuesday, yet the stock still fell. The company posted $7.8 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 92% from a year earlier and above analysts' estimates of $6.82 billion.
Shares dropped as much as 8% in after-hours trading, even as growth accelerated across every business segment. Net loss narrowed to about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.
AI unit revenue more than triples
The company's AI revenue more than trebled to $2.56 billion, boosted by deals to lease data-center capacity and computing power to rival AI groups including Anthropic and Google. Those deals added $1.6 billion in revenue for the quarter but limited SpaceX's capacity to train and run its own competitive AI models.
Bottom-line EBITDA climbed to $3.5 billion, almost three times its year-earlier level, with a backlog of $47.5 billion. However, capital expenditures jumped more than sixfold to $18.37 billion, with $15.83 billion of that spent on AI, exceeding analysts' average estimate of $13.22 billion.
Musk touts orbital data centers, exclusive Nvidia deal
On the earnings call, Musk said the company had made progress on its first generation of orbital data centers, dubbed Starmind AI-1. According to the Financial Times: “This is not some sort of far-future, distant thing.”
He also said SpaceX would rely exclusively on Nvidia hardware in future infrastructure development. The company plans to end this year with 2 gigawatts of computing capacity and have closer to 10 gigawatts than five gigawatts next year, Musk said.
Stock remains far below its IPO peak
Despite the earnings beat, SpaceX shares have shed almost half their value from a peak of $225 in the week after the company went public, wiping more than $1 trillion from its market capitalization.
Short interest in the company has risen to the equivalent of 220 million shares, or roughly 34% of the shares that are freely trading, according to data provider S3 Partners. Analysts at Deutsche Bank said the end of the stock's initial lock-up period for employees on Thursday was weighing on the shares, and that buying by passive funds tracking indices had been lower than expected since SpaceX joined the Nasdaq 100 index last month.
Investors are also weighing the probability of Musk merging SpaceX with Tesla, after he previously consolidated other parts of his business empire. Musk said Tesla was increasingly collaborating with SpaceX, including through Terafab, a semiconductor manufacturing initiative, during Tesla's earnings call last month. Any merger would have to follow the proper process, he added.
Sources: Financial Times, CNBC, CoinGape
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