SpaceX reported $7.8bn in second-quarter revenue, up 92% from $4bn a year earlier, in its first set of results since June's IPO. Nearly $2bn of the growth came from the AI division, and Starlink revenue rose $1.7bn.

The net loss narrowed to $541m from around $1bn, and adjusted EBITDA reached $3.5bn, up 191%. Shares still fell as much as 8% after hours, having already slipped below the $135 IPO price to close near $125.

The compute leasing detail matters more than the headline. Anthropic agreed in May to pay $1.25bn a month for exclusive access to Colossus 1 near Memphis, roughly 220,000 to 325,000 Nvidia GPUs across about 300MW, on a contract running to May 2029.

Google's $920m a month for around 110,000 GPUs does not start until October, so only the Anthropic deal contributed meaningfully to this quarter. Reflection AI added $150m a month from 1 July, and CFO Bret Johnsen flagged a further $6.7bn of cloud services revenue under contract across six months from October.

The cost side is the part investors are staring at: capex hit $18.37bn, more than six times a year earlier, with $15.83bn of it in AI. Cash stands at $93.5bn against $36.8bn of debt and finance leases. Starlink passed 12 million subscribers with ARPU flat at $66.

TechCrunch reports the AI division is the former xAI, absorbed in February's merger. CNBC notes capex beat the $13.22bn analyst consensus by a wide margin, while TechTimes points to 911.5 million insider shares unlocking on 6 August, the largest lock-up expiry on record.

Strip out the rockets and this is a leasing business. Three customers on monthly contracts underwrite the growth story, one of them at $1.25bn a month, which is concentration risk wearing momentum as a disguise. Musk called the $100bn ARR target essentially guaranteed. Investors sold anyway, and the $18bn capex quarter explains why: the maths only holds if tenants keep renewing at these rates.

The South African angle is sharper. Starlink added 1.7 million subscribers in three months and runs in more than 27 African countries, and this is not one of them. ICASA confirmed in June that SpaceX has still filed no licence application, the blocker being the 30% B-BBEE ownership requirement, and in May the regulator said it cannot route around that through equity equivalents unless Parliament amends the Act.

A 2027 launch is the realistic call. Whatever your position on the ownership rules, the fastest-growing connectivity product on the continent is scaling without Africa's largest telecoms market, and rural South Africa carries the cost of the standoff.

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