SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on June 12 after an IPO priced at US$135 a share that raised about US$85.7b.
Its first earnings report as a listed company showed second-quarter revenue of US$7.8b and a net loss of $541 million.
The AI division, which SpaceX now calls “Super Intelligence,” drove the turnaround. Super Intelligence is US President Donald Trump’s preferred term for AI.
The unit’s revenue rose more than nine times from a year earlier to US$7.6b, overtaking the Starlink satellite internet business as the company’s largest source of sales.
Cloud computing
SpaceX credited new cloud services agreements, wider adoption of its Grok chatbot and its acquisition of Cursor, an AI coding start-up.
SpaceX’s cloud customers include Anthropic, which agreed in May to pay nearly US$45b over three years for computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus data centres.
Google signed on in June, agreeing to pay US$920m a month from October through June 2029.
The AI unit turned an operating profit of US$431m, compared with a loss of US$1.7b a year earlier.
As at other AI companies, spending remains heavy.
SpaceX invested US$19.6b in the quarter, US$16.4b of it in AI, bringing capital spending for the first nine months of the year to US$48b.
Its computing capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier.
Revenue at the Starlink satellite internet unit grew 69% to US$5.2b, and consumer subscribers reached 13.6 million.
Average monthly revenue per consumer, however, fell to US$69 from US$83 a year earlier.
SpaceX also completed the first revenue-generating flight of Starship, the giant rocket central to Musk’s Mars ambitions and to deploying satellites at scale.
The flight carried 26 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit.
The company said it had agreed to buy spectrum licences for a planned Starlink mobile service, in a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027.
The results come before another wave of potential SpaceX share sales.
Under the IPO lock-up terms, up to 1.3 billion shares owned by company insiders and early investors become eligible for sale two trading days after third-quarter results.
– AFP
