SpaceX (SPCX) shares are down 6.5% intraday after the company's debut quarterly earnings report revealed an extraordinary surge in AI-related capital expenditures that overshadowed a strong revenue beat.
It’s not all bad news for the market’s tech giants today, though, as comments from Elon Musk have given Nvidia (NVDA) a boost.
AI Spending Sinks SpaceX Stock
Last night, SpaceX reported Q2 2026 revenue of $7.81 billion, representing 92% year-over-year growth and comfortably exceeding the $6.82 billion Wall Street consensus, while its net loss narrowed to $541 million from $1 billion a year earlier.
However, investors are fixated on artificial intelligence (AI) capital expenditures that ballooned to $15.8 billion in the quarter, more than double the $7.7 billion spent in Q1 and far above analyst expectations, bringing total Q2 capex to $18.37 billion.
The massive spending has triggered free cash flow concerns, even as CEO Elon Musk projected SpaceX would reach a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by December 2026 – emphasizing that the target is “not a question mark, but… what we would achieve if we basically did nothing.” Management also pulled forward the company's $1 trillion annual revenue target from 2031 to 2030, with a non-zero chance of achieving the ambitious goal in 2029.
Despite these ambitious projections, the AI segment booked a $1.26 billion operating loss, while Starlink continued as the only profitable division with $1.66 billion in operating income on $4.29 billion in revenue.
Why Nvidia is Higher on SpaceX’s Earnings Selloff
In a key development that directly benefited Nvidia, Musk announced that SpaceX would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia chips, declaring the Vera Rubin architecture to be the best available. This exclusive partnership encompasses both terrestrial data centers and the planned Starmind AI-1 orbital computing satellites, which will feature Nvidia's Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs.
The announcement represents a competitive blow to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which had been positioning its Instinct MI450 as a hyperscaler alternative and was SpaceX's prior chip supplier. AMD stock is down more than 6% today, joining SPCX in a sympathy slide.
Nvidia stock is up 3.7% intraday, extending to what would be its fifth consecutive day of gains, as the SpaceX endorsement reinforced the hyperscaler GPU demand narrative.
NVDA trades at a comparatively modest 36x trailing earnings, and the SpaceX commitment adds another major revenue stream to an already dominant position in AI infrastructure. The combination of SpaceX's massive planned compute buildout and the exclusive supplier arrangement positions Nvidia to capture tens of billions in future chip sales.
Here’s Exactly What Elon Musk Said About Nvidia on the SpaceX Earnings Call
During CEO Elon Musk’s comments to kick off the SpaceX Q2 earnings call with analysts last night, his closing remarks highlighted AI compute investment and Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture specifically:
Regarding AI, we're making rapid progress on Grok... In addition, of course, we are providing compute to others, and we are building and deploying compute, I think, faster, or our rate of growth certainly is faster than anyone else. And our efficiency of compute deployment, I think, is also the highest. So we expect to end this year with over 2 gigawatts of compute. And probably our cumulative compute online by the end of next year will be several times higher. So it may, let's say, be closer to 10 gigawatts of compute than 5 gigawatts of compute. That's a way to think about it.
And going forward, we've decided to build exclusively on NVIDIA because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with NVIDIA. So we're exclusive to NVIDIA…
And then with respect to the Starmind AI satellite, which will be essentially an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 computer, this is not some sort of far-future, distant thing, we expect to start launching these next year.
During the Q&A portion of the call, Musk told Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas: “Our understanding with NVIDIA is that we will receive a very significant percent of their GPUs next year.”
What’s Next for SpaceX Stock – and NVDA
The looming lockup expiration for SPCX on Aug. 6 could massively increase the tradable share count, which means that traders should be extremely cautious about diving into a post-earnings dip here.
As for NVDA, the semiconductor stock is set to report its own quarterly earnings toward the end of the season, with results due out after the closing bell on Aug. 26. Track key pre-earning metrics, including the stock’s expected move, using the NVDA options data dashboard.
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On the date of publication, Sarah Holzmann did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
