SpaceX Reports Its First Earnings as a Public Company, With $14 Billion in New AI Contracts

Revenue rose 92 percent to $7.8 billion for the quarter, beating expectations by nearly a billion. Starlink's subscribers doubled to 12 million, and the company disclosed AI-related contracts that were not part of its business a year ago.

SpaceX published its first quarterly results as a publicly traded company today, two months after the largest stock offering in history. Revenue was $7.8 billion for the quarter, up 92 percent from a year earlier and nearly a billion dollars above what analysts expected. Starlink, the satellite internet service, doubled its subscribers to 12 million. And the company disclosed $14.1 billion in new AI-related contracts.

That last figure is the one worth explaining, because a rocket company booking fourteen billion dollars of AI business needs some accounting for. SpaceX has been moving into computing infrastructure — building its own AI capability, and filing with regulators for a satellite constellation intended to host data centers in orbit, reportedly in partnership with Anthropic. The pitch for orbital computing is that sunlight in space is constant and unfiltered, cooling is free in vacuum, and there are no neighbors to object to the noise or the power draw. The objection is that launching, powering, and never being able to repair a data center 300 miles up is a set of problems nobody has solved.

Whether that works or not, it explains why the company's revenue no longer tracks its rockets. The launches remain the visible business and the cost center. Starlink subscriptions and, increasingly, computing contracts are where the money is.

The stock has fallen back somewhat from its debut, which is unremarkable for a listing that opened as high as this one did. The more interesting number is the contracts, because they represent a bet that the AI buildout will run out of room on Earth before it runs out of money.