SpaceX Revenue Jumps 92% as Starlink Doubles—and the AI Buildout Goes Full Throttle

SpaceX just delivered the first quarterly report of its public-company era, and the top line is hard to miss.

Revenue reached $7.8 billion in the second quarter, up 92% from a year ago. The company still lost money, but that loss narrowed sharply while Starlink, AI infrastructure and the launch business all grew.

The most impressive piece is Starlink. The most aggressive piece is AI.

Starship is still soaking up serious development dollars as SpaceX chases full reusability.

SpaceX put the headline numbers and its biggest operational milestones in one same-day update:

We posted our second quarter 2026 financial and operational results → https://t.co/DOfDhFnAZ5

Q2 highlights:
– Demonstrated the power of extreme vertical integration, delivering revenue growth of 92% year-over-year across Space, Connectivity, and AI
– Completed two successful… pic.twitter.com/9lWxKvtbct

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 4, 2026

SpaceX’s Q2 2026 results show total revenue of $7.814 billion, up from $4.071 billion in the same quarter last year. The net loss narrowed to $541 million from just over $1 billion, while adjusted EBITDA—a non-GAAP measure—rose to $3.538 billion from $1.214 billion.

The report breaks SpaceX into three pieces. Connectivity generated $4.291 billion in revenue and $1.656 billion in operating income.

AI produced $2.561 billion in revenue but still recorded a $1.257 billion operating loss. The Space segment brought in $962 million and posted a $542 million operating loss as Starship research and development accelerated.

That mix explains the quarter. Starlink is now the earnings engine, AI is growing at breakneck speed, and SpaceX is still spending heavily to turn Starship into the fully reusable transportation system that ties the entire plan together.

Starlink ended June with 12 million subscribers, exactly double its year-ago count. Connectivity revenue climbed 66%, and operating income grew 79%.

There is a tradeoff inside those numbers. Average revenue per user was $66 per month, down from $85 a year earlier.

SpaceX is serving far more people at a lower average monthly rate—and the scale is more than making up the difference.

The company also said it activated Starlink aboard additional airlines, expanded mobile partnerships with international carriers and won more than $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield.

AI is where the spending gets enormous.

SpaceX reported $15.828 billion in AI capital expenditures for the quarter, compared with $749 million a year ago. Total company capex reached $18.369 billion.

That money is building compute. SpaceX says its installed nameplate capacity reached 1.4 gigawatts, up from 0.4 gigawatts a year earlier, while new cloud-service agreements produced $14.1 billion in contracted sales.

The hardware strategy became even more concrete just before the earnings release. SpaceX announced that it is working with Nvidia on Starmind AI1, a satellite compute payload built around Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs:

SpaceX is partnering with @Nvidia to design the Starmind AI1 satellite compute payload.

Each of the Starmind satellites will include NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs for datacenter class space compute → https://t.co/4MOQv0DvTQ pic.twitter.com/rC7UBAznAO

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 4, 2026

Axios reports that the $7.81 billion result beat the $6.9 billion estimate tracked by S&P Visible Alpha, yet SpaceX shares still fell more than 8% after hours after rising 9.4% during regular trading.

The earnings call made clear that Elon Musk is not planning to ease off. He moved SpaceX’s target for $1 trillion in annual revenue forward to 2030 from 2031 and said there is a chance it could arrive in 2029.

He also projected up to 10 gigawatts of computing power by the end of 2027.

SpaceX ended the quarter with roughly $100 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, plus a $47.5 billion backlog. That is an extraordinary war chest, but the scale of the AI buildout means investors will be watching how quickly the company turns spending into durable revenue.

The Associated Press adds that infrastructure and research spending climbed to about $18 billion from less than $3 billion a year earlier. SpaceX told investors to expect a similar capital-spending pace over the next two quarters.

The next Starship reusability test could come near the end of August, when SpaceX plans to attempt catches of both the booster and ship with the launch tower’s mechanical arms. Company president Gwynne Shotwell also said SpaceX wants to put astronauts on the Moon in 2028.

There is another near-term pressure point: more than 900 million insider shares are expected to become eligible for trading as the first lockup tranche begins to ease on Thursday. That could keep the stock volatile even after a quarter that beat Wall Street’s revenue and loss estimates.

The numbers do not say SpaceX has solved every hard problem. The company still posted a net loss.

Its Space and AI segments both lost money on an operating basis. Starship reusability remains unfinished engineering.

But this quarter shows why SpaceX is so difficult to compare with an ordinary rocket company.

Starlink has become a massive, profitable connectivity business. Launches keep the network growing.

AI is now a real revenue line with $2.561 billion booked in one quarter. The company also has enough cash to fund several moonshot-scale projects at once.

Revenue growth of 92% is the headline. The more important signal may be that all the pieces—Starlink, Starship, Starshield and AI compute—are starting to show up together in one set of financial statements.