SpaceX Q1 2026 earnings: $7.8B revenue (up 92% YoY), but AI segment now bigger than rocket launches

SpaceX Q1 2026: $7.8B Revenue, but AI Now Outpaces Rocket Launches

SpaceX reported $7.81 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, up 92% year-over-year from $4.1 billion, beating analyst expectations of $6.93 billion. The company posted a 9-cent loss per share versus the estimated 26-cent loss, but stock traded down roughly 4.5% after hours as investors absorbed a fundamental shift in the company's business mix.

The headline growth masks a structural realignment. Starlink, the connectivity business, generated $4.29 billion—accounting for the majority of revenue and the company's only profitable segment. The space launch division, traditionally SpaceX's core business, brought in $962 million against a $835 million expectation. But the more significant development is the AI segment, which posted $2.56 billion against a $2.18 billion forecast.

AI revenue now exceeds launch revenue by 2.7x.

This shift reflects the February merger with Musk's xAI and the pivot toward building data center capacity in orbit. The company lost $4.9 billion last year, heavily weighted to AI infrastructure investments. NASA contracts—a historical anchor for the launch business—are now loss-making units within the division.

SpaceX has also formalized a partnership with Nvidia to design the Starmind AI payload, bringing data center-class compute directly into orbit. The move signals an aggressive bet that satellite-based AI infrastructure will displace terrestrial data centers as the primary constraint on frontier model training and inference.

Since opening at $150 per share in June, SpaceX stock has fallen 12–16%, reflecting either underperformance relative to near-term profitability expectations or broader market skepticism about the viability of space-based compute economics at scale. The earnings beat on all three segments did not arrest the decline.