SpaceX went public in June in the largest-ever initial public offering, turning its founder Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.
Since then, the rocket maker has had a rocky ride in the stock market, and Mr. Musk has returned to mere billionaire status, amid questions about the company’s spending on artificial intelligence and whether it can achieve its ambitious ideas, such as launching A.I. data centers into space and building a rocket powerful enough to reach Mars.
On Tuesday, SpaceX showed just how much it was investing to hit those goals.
In its first earnings report as a public company, SpaceX said its capital expenditures jumped to $18.4 billion in the second quarter, up nearly seven times from $2.8 billion a year ago. The spending overshadowed a 92 percent increase in revenue to $7.8 billion. SpaceX also posted a quarterly loss of $541 million, narrower than the $1 billion loss in the same period a year ago.
SpaceX shares fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.
The results underline how drumming up excitement for SpaceX’s public offering may have been easier than keeping that hype going. The company is trying to strike the tricky balance of displaying near-term financial progress while spending big sums on its expensive, long-term aspirations of building orbital data centers, factories on the moon and sending humans to Mars.
How SpaceX fares on the stock market may affect the A.I. start-ups Anthropic and OpenAI, which have also filed to go public. So far, the rocket company may not be inspiring confidence. In recent weeks, its stock has fallen below its I.P.O. price. More bumpiness may be ahead, when insiders are released on Thursday from a “lockup” period that prevented them from selling their shares, potentially flooding the market with more of the stock.
Paul Golding, an analyst at Macquarie, cautioned reading too much into SpaceX’s stock performance or its short-term financial results. The focal point, he said, should be on the company’s outlook for its cutting-edge A.I. models, orbital data centers, its satellite internet service Starlink, and Starship, its largest-ever rocket that successfully completed a test flight last month.
With its investments in rockets, satellite internet and A.I. infrastructure, SpaceX has a “moat” that leaves it “uniquely positioned to achieve these big-picture goals,” Mr. Golding said.
SpaceX made progress in some of its businesses. Starlink increased subscribers to 12 million, up from 6 million in the same period last year. Its revenue rose 66 percent to $4.3 billion.
The payoff from its A.I. spending is less certain. SpaceX faces stiff competition for its A.I. products, such as its Grok chatbot. It continues to invest heavily in A.I. and in June announced a $60 billion deal to buy Cursor, a start-up that develops A.I. tools for writing computer code. That transaction is expected to close in the current quarter.
More recently, SpaceX has developed a business renting out A.I. computing power from data centers it built for its own A.I. efforts. The company has signed deals to lease excess computing capacity to Google, Anthropic and others.
Mr. Golding said he expected those deals, which could total in the tens of billions of dollars over the next three years, to be reflected in future earnings. Anthropic, which is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month until May 2029 for computing power, started using SpaceX’s data centers this May at a reduced fee. Google’s deal begins in October.
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