Markets SPCX AUG 05, 2026

SpaceX craters 13% on debut earnings as $18.4B AI capex swamps $7.8B revenue

SPCX closed at $125 — below its $135 IPO price — after Q2 capex jumped sixfold, with $15.83B flowing to xAI infrastructure ahead of Thursday's insider lockup expiry.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

SpaceX shares fell 13% Wednesday after the company’s first quarterly report as a public entity revealed $18.37 billion in Q2 capital expenditures against $7.81 billion in revenue, with $15.83 billion of that spending routed to xAI’s compute buildout. SPCX closed just above $125, below its June 12 IPO price of $135 and well off a post-listing high above $200.

The capex print blew past the $13.09 billion Bloomberg consensus for the AI segment and represented a sixfold jump from $2.83 billion in the year-ago quarter. First-half 2026 capex now stands at $28.48 billion, against $6.97 billion in H1 2025. This isn’t a spending increase. It’s a category change.

The segment breakdown tells the story the tape reacted to. Starlink connectivity generated $4.29 billion in revenue against $1.37 billion in capex and $2.60 billion in adjusted EBITDA. The Space segment produced $962 million on $1.17 billion of capex. The xAI segment, by contrast, booked $2.56 billion in revenue against nearly $16 billion in capex, an operating loss of $1.26 billion, and $1.15 billion in adjusted EBITDA (up from a $276 million loss a year earlier). Total revenue grew 92% year-over-year. Management pulled its $1 trillion annual revenue target forward to 2030 from 2031 and reaffirmed a $100 billion ARR goal for December.

Elon Musk was unambiguous on the call. “To be clear, the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That’s what we would achieve if we basically did nothing.” CFO Bret Johnsen described the AI compute deployments as offering “less than a one-year payback,” pointing to contracted revenue including a Google arrangement worth up to $920 million monthly and an Anthropic agreement of up to $1.25 billion.

Wall Street didn’t buy the framing. Bloomberg’s Edward Harrison characterized the day’s action as the market “sorting winners and losers” in the AI race, and Thursday’s insider lockup expiry, which could release up to 20% of insider-held shares, sits directly in the tape’s path. The first public quarter of the most anticipated IPO of the cycle has become a referendum on whether AI capex is investment or dilution, adjudicated in real time by holders who couldn’t sell until now.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.