SpaceX doubles revenue on Anthropic and Google compute deals, Starlink growth
Quick Answer
SpaceX's revenue surged 92% to $7.8 billion in Q2 2026, driven by Starlink growth and compute deals with Anthropic and Google.
Quick Take
Despite a $541 million loss, the company anticipates reaching a $100 billion annual revenue run-rate by year-end, bolstered by $6.7 billion in cloud services contracts.
Key Points
- Total sales increased from $4 billion in Q2 2025 to $7.8 billion in Q2 2026.
- AI division contributed nearly $2 billion to revenue growth this quarter.
- SpaceX plans to achieve a $100 billion annual revenue run-rate by year-end.
- The company reported over $28 billion in capital expenditures in the first half of 2026.
- SpaceX's shares closed at just over $125, down from the IPO price of $135.
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~3 min readSpaceX doubled its revenue compared to last year, in large part thanks to the growth of its Starlink satellite internet service and deals it struck to rent out computing power to Anthropic and Google, the company revealed in its first quarterly earnings since going public.
Total sales grew from $4 billion in the second quarter of 2025 to $7.8 billion in Q2 2026, a jump of 92%. Nearly $2 billion of that growth came from its AI division, while Starlink revenue also grew by $1.7 billion. The company still lost $541 million in the quarter, but that was down from $1 billion in the second quarter last year.
SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said on Tuesday that SpaceX has an additional $6.7 billion of cloud services revenue under contract “over a six month period that begins ramping starting in October of this year.” He also said he believes that, once it fully integrates AI startup Cursor, that it will reach a $100 billion annualized revenue run-rate [ARR] by the end of this year. (The company reported $18.67 billion in revenue in 2025.)
CEO Elon Musk went even farther, saying: “the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That’s what we would achieve if we basically did nothing. So I think it may be higher than that. It probably will be higher than that.”
After a successful post-IPO bond sale, the company now has a $100 billion war chest. And it’s not slowing its spending. It reported more than $28 billion in capital expenditures through the first half of this year, up from just $7 billion through the first six months of 2025.
SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings report was released nearly two months after the company pulled off the largest IPO in history. SpaceX raised more than $85 billion and went public at a valuation of $1.75 trillion.
The company’s market cap rocketed up in the first few days of trading, briefly passing Amazon and nearly equaling Microsoft. But it has suffered since then, plunging below the IPO price of $135 per share reportedly set by CEO Elon Musk himself. The shares closed at just over $125 on Tuesday, but sank as much as 8% in after-hours trading.
Both of those compute deals were announced in the weeks before SpaceX’s IPO, and they represented a major pivot for the company. SpaceX’s AI division, which used to be Musk’s own startup xAI before it was absorbed into the rocket company, has been trying — but failing — to catch up to the leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and win over customers. These struggles were happening at the same time that xAI was creating repeated scandals, like when its Grok chatbot started calling itself “MechaHitler,” or how the tech was generating child sexual abuse material.
The company had already built out two data centers in and near Memphis, Tennessee to train xAI’s models, so it instead pivoted much of that capacity to be rented out to customers like Anthropic and Google.
“The incremental revenue from new hosting deals generated high incremental EBITDA margins as we monetized available compute capacity,” Johnsen said on a conference call Tuesday.
This story is developing…
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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