SpaceX Made Twice as Much Money — So Why Did Its Stock Drop?
SpaceX just reported that its revenue nearly doubled compared to a year ago in its first earnings report as a public company. But instead of celebrating, investors pushed the share price down after hours.
The Q2 2026 results, covered live by CNBC, were the first look at SpaceX's finances since the company went public in June 2026. The IPO — the first time a company sells shares to the general public — priced at up to $162.00 per share in a prospectus approved by Bafin on June 5, 2026 (SpaceX EU Prospectus). It was the largest IPO ever (New York Times).
The revenue growth is the headline. But the stock drop tells you what investors actually cared about: SpaceX plans to build its AI data centers using only Nvidia chips and expects to have over 2 gigawatts of computing power by the end of 2026, according to the same CNBC coverage. For context, 2 gigawatts is about as much electricity as two large nuclear power plants produce, all going toward running AI systems. That kind of spending means less cash left over for the company and could squeeze profitability.
The AI push started earlier. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, bringing it inside SpaceX (Associated Press). Before that, xAI's chatbot Grok ran on Microsoft's cloud servers (Associated Press). By bringing AI in-house, SpaceX stopped renting computing power and started building its own, matching its claim of being the only company that can handle every step of an AI system itself (SpaceX).
Not everyone was happy about the xAI deal. Some SpaceX investors called it a bailout and unethical (Associated Press). The same deal that gave SpaceX a shot at AI revenue also loaded the company with integration challenges and governance questions right before going public.
The IPO paperwork also revealed how much money SpaceX was losing: $4.28 billion in a single quarter (Reuters). So while doubling revenue is a good sign, it was not enough to ease investor worries about how much the company plans to spend going forward.
On August 4, 2026, Musk posted on X that Reflection AI has agreed to pay SpaceX roughly $150 million per month — about $1.8 billion per year — for computing services from July 2026 through 2029. He said total contracted compute revenue comes to about $28 billion per year (Elon Musk on X). If those contracts hold, they help explain why SpaceX is spending so heavily. But the gap between today's losses and tomorrow's promised revenue is the core debate.
On the infrastructure side, SpaceX is preparing its Gigabay facility in Florida, with construction targeted for completion by the end of 2026 (SpaceX). Further out, the company's Starmind satellite factory is supposed to produce and deploy thousands of AI satellites starting as early as late 2027 (SpaceX). Musk has said the IPO money will fund up to 1 million data-center satellites in orbit, designed to avoid the power and water limits of building data centers on Earth (Reuters). That idea faces the same kind of problems that led Microsoft to give up on a similar project, as Reuters noted.
The broader context here is that investors are weighing two very different stories at once. One: a company that nearly doubled its revenue and has tens of billions in signed contracts. The other: a company losing over $4 billion a quarter, planning to build enormous amounts of computing power, launching satellites that will not be ready until late 2027 or later, and chasing an orbital data-center vision with big technical and regulatory unknowns. The after-hours stock drop shows investors are focused on that second story for now.
What happens next depends on a few concrete things: whether SpaceX actually reports compute revenue in Q3 and Q4 matching Musk's $150 million monthly figure, how much the company says it will spend relative to its 2-gigawatt goal, and whether Gigabay is operational by year-end. Until that contracted revenue shows up in official financial statements rather than social media posts, the gap between the optimistic case and the actual numbers remains the central tension.
