SpaceX Earnings Takeaways: Soaring AI Costs Outweigh Revenue Beat in First Report Since IPO

17 Hours Ago Shotwell expects Starlink Mobile standalone service by end of 2027 Shotwell said on the call that during the quarter SpaceX launched Starlink mobile partnerships with international carriers, including SoftBank, NTT DoCoMo and Spark New Zealand. She said the "near-term priority" is launching the company's mobile V2 satellites on Starship before an integration with EchoStar spectrum next year. A spectrum transfer was recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission, and "represents a foundational competitive advantage for Starlink mobile," Shotwell said. SpaceX will later go after AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile customers with its forthcoming Starlink mobile service as early as next year, and plans to build out a terrestrial network in the U.S. using the EchoStar spectrum, Shotwell said. The company aims to fly satellites that can deliver the standalone service in 2027, she said, and to be able to provide Starlink Mobile to its first customers by the end of next year as well. "I expect us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers," Shotwell said. "I think our service will be better. We will eliminate dead zones, leveraging, basically, satellites in orbit." -- Lora Kolodny 17 Hours Ago Cursor update to come after regulatory approvals, Musk says watch now As the earnings call was wrapping up, Musk responded to a question about the Cursor deal by choosing not to respond. The $60 billion transaction is expected to close in the third quarter. "We're trying to get the acquisition closed as quickly as possible," Musk said. "I think we're pretty close to that. But we're wary of sort of jumping the gun on regulatory closures." Musk has clashed with regulators in the past over social media posts concerning material information about deals, including his Twitter leveraged buyout, and a take-private deal for Tesla he said was in the works but that never materialized. -- Lora Kolodny 17 Hours Ago Nvidia stock climbs on Musk endorsement Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang. Chip Somodevilla | Kim Soo-hyeon | Reuters Nvidia shares rose about 2% in extended trading after Musk said the chipmaker has the "best AI computer" and pledged that SpaceX would use its Vera Rubin processors exclusively. — Kif Leswing 18 Hours Ago Ad revenue decline continues Ad revenue in the quarter dropped 14% from a year earlier, a decline SpaceX blamed on a migration to a new advertising system. In April SpaceX started to release the new technology, including the X Ads Manager, according to its prospectus. SpaceX said the X Ads Manager was meant to help advertisers more quickly launch campaigns, with one system for creation, optimization and monitoring. Ad sales fell to $367 million from $426 million in the same quarter last year. — Jordan Novet 18 Hours Ago SpaceX CFO says capital deployment has 'less than a one-year payback' Johnsen said that SpaceX's capital deployment is so efficient that the company is seeing returns in very short order. "All capex is not the same," Johnsen said on the call. "Specifically 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." He added that capital is becoming an item that would otherwise be put in cost of goods sold, or COGS, "because it's moving so quickly." — Ari Levy 18 Hours Ago Execs tout Starlink growth on earnings call In this photo illustration, a Starlink system is shown on Sept. 13, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson | Getty Images On the earnings call, Musk talked up the potential for SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service to maintain and expand its lead. "It's not out of the question that, at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world's internet, at least in countries where we are allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries," Musk said. He added that he thinks this can happen in "less than 10 years." SpaceX named more than 20 companies as competitors to Starlink in its prospectus, including Amazon, Blue Origin,Viasat,AT&TandT-Mobile. Some competitors are also customers, using SpaceX launches to get their satellites into orbit. Shotwell said on the call that she's "very bullish" on both enterprise and government growth for Starlink moving forward. Musk said Starlink had offered only "patchy" connectivity in its early days, but that it has "incredible uptime and low latency" today, so more offices and agencies can treat Starlink as a "primary provider" of internet service, not a backup provider. -- Lora Kolodny 18 Hours Ago SpaceX on pace to reach $100 billion in ARR by end of year, CFO says Bret Johnsen, chief financial officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), center, during the company's initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Friday, June 12, 2026. Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen said on the earnings call that the company is on pace to reach $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by the end of the year. Johnsen said that in the first few weeks of the current quarter, SpaceX has contracted an additional $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue "over a six month period that begins ramping starting in October." The figure for the end of the year assumes contributions from cursor, Johnsen said. — Ari Levy 18 Hours Ago SpaceX will build AI compute using Nvidia chips exclusively, Musk says Nvidia CEO Jensen Hwang introduces Vera Rubin, a next-generation AI data center platform, and Rubin Ultra, a next-generation AI GPU architecture, during the keynote address at the company's annual GTC developers conference in San Jose, California, on March 16, 2026. Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images Musk told shareholders in his opening remarks on the earnings call that SpaceX plans to build its AI data centers exclusively using Nvidia chips. He said he expects to end 2026 with over 2 gigawatts of compute, growing closer to 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027. The AI infrastructure will go to support the company's own AI model development and services, and will help cloud computing customers. Musk said the company sees Nvidia's Vera Rubin as "the best AI computer." "And we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia," he said. — Lora Kolodny 18 Hours Ago Nvidia partners with SpaceX on orbital data centers SpaceX announced a partnership with Nvidia to collaborate on the design of "space compute," or hardware for use running AI models and services on satellites in orbit, powered by solar panels and the sun. The companies will work "to design the Starmind AI1 satellite compute payload," SpaceX wrote in a social media post, adding that each satellite "will include NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs for datacenter class space compute." No company has proven space-based data centers can work. And SpaceX's aim to launch up to 1 million orbital data centers has drawn the ire of scientists concerned about orbital debris, and other severe environmental risks. In January, Nvidia took an equity stake in xAI as part of its $20 billion funding round, and the shares converted into stock in SpaceX. — Lora Kolodny 19 Hours Ago Capital expenditures jump more than sixfold to $18.4 billion The SpaceX logo is displayed at a SpaceX facility on Aug. 4, 2026 in Hawthorne, California. Justin Sullivan | Getty Images Capital expenditures jumped more than sixfold from a year earlier to $18.37 billion in the second quarter. Most of that — $15.83 billion — was in AI. The total capex figure exceeded the $13.22 billion average analyst estimate, according to FactSet. Following results from Alphabet, Meta,Microsoft and Amazon over the past couple weeks, the company's AI costs are under a microscope. — Lora Kolodny 19 Hours Ago Cash surpasses $90 billion after IPO With the proceeds from SpaceX's record IPO, the company now has cash and equivalents of $93.5 billion, up from $24.7 billion at the end of the first quarter. Mea