The China Mail - Rockets, Starlink, AI: SpaceX faces its first Wall Street grilling

With a market valuation hovering around $1.5 trillion, the company must prove that it can, in the long run, turn its various promises -- dominating artificial intelligence, creating data centers in space, colonizing Mars -- into profits for investors.

Failing to deliver on those promises would reach far beyond Wall Street; SpaceX was added to the Nasdaq 100 in July, which means it is now embedded in the retirement savings of millions of Americans.

For now, no one is expecting profits from its current quarter, which ended in June.

Analysts on average expect a loss of $1.9 billion on revenue of $6.8 billion in SpaceX's second quarter, but that loss is around a 50 percent improvement compared to the previous quarter. SpaceX could also break even by the end of September.

That improvement is thanks, in particular, to the mega-contract signed with AI lab Anthropic, which since July has been paying $1.25 billion dollars a month to use SpaceX's Colossus data center near Memphis, Tennessee.

Above all, Tuesday's results will show the extent of SpaceX's evolution from being primarily a rocket company to a conglomerate with AI at its core.

Rocket launches, historically the core of SpaceX's business, now account for only a fifth of its revenue and lose money. Starlink, its satellite internet business, provides more than half of revenue and remains the only profitable segment.

But the AI division — which encompasses the social network X, the Grok conversational robot, and data center leasing -- is expected to become the group's leading source of revenue as early as the current quarter.

Because in addition to Anthropic, Google is preparing this fall to pay SpaceX $920 million a month to use its computing power, and the startup Reflection AI has signed a similar deal.

SpaceX thus rents out its machines to its own competitors as its AI model Grok struggles to gain commercial traction against OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.

These contracts, however, can be terminated with just three months' notice. Google itself describes its deal as short-term "backup capacity."

"AI is the growth story but rests on computer contracts that expire by end-2029," Phillip Securities, one of the few firms to recommend selling the stock, said in an analyst note.

– Merger with Tesla? –

Another closely watched issue: spending.

For every dollar it takes in, SpaceX invests nearly two, both in its data centers and in Starship, its mega-rocket still in testing and on which a large part of the whole business depends.

The group is expected to keep burning tens of billions of dollars in cash for at least three more years, according to observers.

Uncertainty will also linger this week until a lockup period expires on Thursday, allowing a portion of SpaceX employees to sell their shares post-IPO. That could more than double the already limited number of shares in circulation, which currently sits at around 5 percent.

"We believe the quarterly results should not matter," analysts at the firm Bernstein said in a note.

Rather, it will be Musk's remarks that will move the stock, depending on what he says about capital expenditures, a potential $60 billion-dollar buyout of AI startup Cursor or even a rumored merger with his carmaker Tesla.

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