SpaceX posts $7.8 billion Q2 revenue, beats Wall Street estimates in first post-IPO earnings

SpaceX posted $7.8 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, beating Wall Street’s forecast of roughly $6.8 billion in the company’s first quarterly report since going public in June. The company narrowed its net loss to $541 million, or 9 cents a share, well ahead of analysts’ projected 26-cent loss, but it did not turn a profit, despite the surge in sales.

Revenue jumped 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier, with growth accelerating across all three of SpaceX’s business lines: Space, Connectivity, and AI. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) nearly tripled to $3.5 billion, up 191% year-over-year, a sign the company is gaining operating leverage even as it pours money into new infrastructure.

Shares initially rose in regular trading before swinging sharply after hours as investors weighed the results against SpaceX’s ballooning capital spending, which hit $18.4 billion for the quarter, most of it funnelled into AI infrastructure.

SpaceX: Connectivity, the profit engine

Starlink and the broader Connectivity segment remained SpaceX’s biggest business and its only profitable one, generating $4.3 billion in revenue, up 66% year-over-year, and $1.7 billion in operating income, up 79%. Starlink subscribers doubled from a year ago to 12 million, with 1.7 million net additions in the quarter, while average revenue per user held steady at $66 a month.

Growth was broad-based: consumer revenue rose 44% year-over-year, while enterprise and government revenue more than doubled, up 108%. The company signed a major deal with American Airlines and expanded Starlink service on Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Iberia and Aer Lingus. It struck new Starlink Mobile partnerships with SoftBank, NTT Docomo and Spark NZ. It also won more than $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, its secure satellite network for national security customers. It gained FCC approval to absorb EchoStar’s spectrum licences.

AI: Fast growth, still losing money

The AI segment, built around the xAI/Grok business SpaceX absorbed in an all-stock merger earlier this year, was the quarter’s fastest grower, with revenue up 247% year-over-year to $2.6 billion. Losses from operations narrowed by nearly half from the first quarter to $1.3 billion, and the segment turned Adjusted EBITDA-positive for the first time, at $1.1 billion.

The jump was driven largely by $14.1 billion worth of new cloud services agreements signed during the quarter that fuelled AI infrastructure revenue, plus rising Grok and X subscription income. SpaceX also announced a $60 billion deal to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor, expected to close in the third quarter, and released its Grok 4.5 model in July. Compute capacity expanded to 1.4 gigawatts, up from 1.0 GW in the first quarter, as the company builds out its “Colossus II” data centre campus. AI capital spending alone hit $15.8 billion for the quarter.

Space: Steady launch cadence, deepening losses

The original Space segment, Falcon 9 and Starship launch operations, posted revenue of $962 million, up 29% year-over-year, but its operating loss widened to $542 million as SpaceX accelerated R&D spending on Starship. The company completed 38 launches in the quarter (78 for the first half of the year) and delivered 485 metric tonnes of mass to orbit, with most capacity going toward building out the Starlink constellation.

Starship’s V3 programme hit milestones during and just after the quarter: a successful suborbital Flight 12 in May from the new Starbase pad, followed by Flight 13 in July, which deployed 20 production V3 satellites, demonstrated an in-space Raptor engine relight, and achieved what the company called its softest-ever splashdown.

SpaceX closed its IPO in mid-June, raising roughly $85.7 billion in net proceeds, and later closed a $25 billion investment-grade bond offering. It ended the quarter with $100 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, and a $47.5 billion backlog, a war chest executives say gives them room to keep funding Starship, Starlink’s next-generation satellites, and AI compute buildout.

“Revenue growth accelerated across all our business segments, and we delivered strong operating leverage, with significant margin expansion led by our new AI compute agreements,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in the earnings release.

Despite the revenue beat, some investors focused on the scale of spending: capital expenditures more than quadrupled from $2.8 billion a year earlier, and SpaceX shares have fallen well below their $150 opening price since the June debut. Management has said it expects SpaceX to reach a $100 billion annualised revenue run rate by the end of 2026.