According to the company's second-quarter report, SpaceX completed its initial public offering (IPO) in June 2026. Subsequently, in its first post-listing quarterly report, space, Link, and AI were all featured prominently. In the past, people used to associate this company with rocket launches and the Starlink satellite constellation. Now, the previously hidden internal trade-offs have tangible figures.
Most attention-grabbing is the growth rate of AI. However, according to the company's second-quarter performance appendix, the AI division contributed 32.8% of the combined revenue but accounted for 86.2% of the quarter's capital expenditure. The fact that revenue and capital expenditure are not aligned is the most noteworthy aspect of this report.
How SpaceX Is Making Money Now
Starting with the income statement, the conclusion is not mysterious. The Link division remains the largest revenue source of the quarter. According to the company's second-quarter performance appendix, it brought in $4.291 billion in revenue, while the AI division brought in $2.561 billion. This division includes Starlink's consumer, enterprise, and government business, still supporting the thickest layer of revenue for the period.
Figure one only selected three disclosed comparative points in time and is not a continuous quarterly sequence. Even so, the change in AI is still quite evident. By the latest quarter, the orange portion has significantly expanded, while the Link division still occupies the largest blue area. The same company is running two businesses with different rhythms: one is the current larger-scale Link service revenue, and the other is the rapidly expanding AI business.
Here, we need to draw a boundary for the "AI division." According to the company's second-quarter performance appendix, Grok, the X platform, consumer and enterprise AI solutions, and AI computing infrastructure are all grouped under the same division. Therefore, the AI revenue on the chart cannot be directly equated to pure cloud service revenue, as it also includes ad revenue.
This changes the interpretation. If one only focuses on the year-over-year growth rate of AI, it's easy to see it as an already independently matured cloud service business. The financial report depicts more of a business basket that is undergoing consolidation and expansion. It has models, platforms, and ongoing AI infrastructure development.
Where the Money Is Flowing
The income statement records services that have already been sold, while capital expenditure shows where the company is investing in infrastructure. In Figure two, although the revenue share of AI has not yet caught up with the Link division, the capital expenditure share has far exceeded it. According to the company's second-quarter performance appendix, AI accounts for 32.8% of revenue, while capital expenditure represents 86.2%.
Adding this contrast in terms of amounts will provide a better sense of scale. According to the company's Q2 earnings supplement, the AI division's capital expenditure for the quarter was $15.828 billion, while the quarterly revenue was $2.561 billion. This is like comparing the construction cost of a factory with the current rent on the same sheet of paper – it shows a significant difference in scale but does not align item by item. The comparison here is between the division's capital expenditure and the current revenue, not the division's cash flow.
Figure 3 places these two bars back into the three disclosed comparison points. In the latest quarter, for every $1 of AI revenue, there was $6.18 of capital expenditure, according to the company's Q2 earnings supplement. This is not a confirmation rate, nor can future profits be extrapolated from this. It only indicates that the current revenue and the equipment, data centers, and related infrastructure allocated for AI are not currently at the same level.
The disclosed nominal power consumption has also increased from 0.4GW in the same period a year ago to 1.4GW. According to the earnings supplement's definition, this is calculated based on installed GPU and total power consumption, not representing actual power consumption or utilization. This set of changes is like adding a lane to a new highway. What can be confirmed at the moment is that the road is widening, but the financial report does not disclose how many vehicles have driven on each lane.
Another column on the same divisional table provides a more modest footnote for this expansion. According to the company's Q2 earnings supplement, the AI division still reported an operating loss of $1.257 billion for the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA can help observe the operating structure but cannot replace cash flow. Capital expenditure, adjusted EBITDA, and operating loss in the chart are of different natures and cannot be used interchangeably.
$14.1 Billion Contract Sales, How Much Incremental Revenue Did Q2 Bring
One of the most highlighted figures in the financial report is the total contract sales of $14.1 billion from multiple cloud service agreements. According to the company's Q2 earnings supplement, these agreements brought $1.6 billion in incremental AI infrastructure revenue for the quarter. The former represents the total value of contracts, while the latter only indicates the incremental revenue from new agreements for AI infrastructure in this quarter.
This earnings supplement does not separately disclose the total recognized revenue from these new agreements for the quarter. Therefore, these two figures cannot be used to calculate a recognition rate, nor can the difference be considered as unearned revenue.
According to the company's Q2 earnings supplement, SpaceX has a specific definition for "contract sales." It covers the contract's total value for the non-cancelable period, including the revenue already recognized and related deferred revenue for the period, excluding any future amounts the customer can cancel. Treating the total contract value as revenue for a quarter is akin to considering a full year's lease agreement as rent received in the landlord's account today.
Another contract table for the entire company also needs to be reviewed separately. According to the company's Q2 earnings report, the quarter-end backlog stood at $47.461 billion, with deferred revenue of $14.286 billion being just a part of it. Both figures may overlap with the revenue from cloud service agreements, and their sum should not be treated as a standalone contract pool.
The company anticipates that 56% of the backlog will be recognized within one year. As per the company's Q2 earnings report, this provides a time dimension to revenue, maintaining a distance between delivery and recognition. Orders piling up at the door do not mean that each one will pass through the revenue recognition counter in the same quarter.
SpaceX's new ledger has been split into two pages. One page details the Link division's current revenue being brought back, while the other page outlines AI's capital expenditure allocation. Reading the two pages separately, the contract sales amount appears more like the total value of an entire non-cancellable contract period rather than an answer to quarterly revenue.
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