SpaceX AI capex soars 6x to $18.4B, shares drop 7.5%

SpaceX shares tumbled 7.5% in after-hours trading on August 5, 2026, after the company reported capital expenditures that swelled sixfold to $18.4 billion. The spending, which more than doubled total quarterly sales and exceeded the $13.22 billion analyst consensus, wiped out earlier gains and left the stock down more than 20% from its June 12, 2026 IPO price.

More than 80% of the outlay went to artificial intelligence, a market where SpaceX lags behind leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and where it now competes with cloud giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google by selling compute capacity.

SpaceX entered the AI business in February 2026 through a merger with Elon Musk’s xAI.

CFO Bret Johnsen said on an earnings call that the company is achieving a payback period of less than one year on AI compute deployments. He noted that early in the current quarter, SpaceX contracted $6.7 billion in cloud services revenue over six months starting in October, and projected the company is on pace to reach $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by year-end, assuming the $60 billion Cursor acquisition closes.

CEO Elon Musk told investors that hitting the $100 billion target by December 2026 is 'not a question mark.'

SpaceX has inked deals to provide AI compute capacity: an agreement with Google could bring in up to $920 million a month, while Anthropic has committed to pay up to $1.25 billion a month for three years for capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee. A separate deal with Reflection AI could generate up to $150 million a month.

Yet SpaceXAI, the company’s AI unit, has been losing money. In the second quarter, it generated $2.56 billion in revenue but posted a $1.26 billion operating loss, following a $2.47 billion loss in the first quarter on $818 million in revenue.

The unit also faces legal challenges: it has been sued for using natural gas turbines at its Memphis facilities without pollution controls or federal permits, and recorded a $354 million accrual for probable litigation losses.

Musk said the company has projects totaling 20 gigawatts of capacity by the end of next year, though some may face delays.

The earnings report arrived amid heightened scrutiny of AI infrastructure spending, with Alphabet and Amazon each on track to potentially spend over $200 billion in 2026.