SpaceX shares fall over AI spending concerns as rocket crashes into moon at 8,700Km/h

Shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX have fallen sharply, tumbling nearly 9% in after-hours trading following the release of the company’s first earnings report since going public.

The steep decline was triggered by investor anxiety over soaring capital expenditure, driven primarily by an aggressive push into artificial intelligence and extensive data centre development.

While quarterly revenue nearly doubled to $7.8bn, spending skyrocketed to $18.3bn – more than six times higher than the previous year. This massive outlay led to a net loss of $143m for the three months leading up to June, pushing losses for the first half of the year to $2bn.

Despite the bruising numbers, Musk defended the corporate strategy during an investor call, insisting critics are underestimating the firm’s long-term roadmap. Musk outlined plans to scale computing capacity from 1.4 gigawatts to 10 gigawatts by next year, claiming that building data centres is a trivial problem compared to making reusable rockets.

While Wall Street weighed the high-stakes AI gamble, SpaceX also faced attention regarding a discarded rocket from a previous mission that has struck the lunar surface. Part of a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket – launched in January of last year carrying ispace’s Hakuto-R spacecraft – crashed into the moon at 8,700 kilometres per hour near the Einstein crater.

Astronomers worldwide trained telescopes on the impact site, which NASA predicts created a crater roughly 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep. The heavy payload required extra thrust during the 2025 launch, leaving the 14-metre, 4,000-kilogram upper stage floating uncontrollably before an unintended orbit put it on a collision course with the moon.

The lunar impact has reignited discussions over space debris regulation. Hannah Sargeant at the University of Leicester criticised the lack of mandatory deorbiting rules for commercial missions compared to government space agencies, noting: “It is not a good thing to be randomly sending debris into the moon. It’s not something we should be making a habit of. What if it hit a site of special interest? What if it caused damage to the historical Apollo landers?”

However, other researchers noted potential scientific benefits. Roberto Bugiolacchi at the Macau University of Science and Technology pointed out that such impacts provide useful data. “Knowing the projectile’s mass, impact velocity, angle and trajectory provide invaluable data on surface evolution,” Bugiolacchi said. “The primary agent shaping most planetary surfaces is high-velocity impacts.”

New Scientist