SpaceX shares slide on the heels of first quarterly report

On Wednesday, the stock closed down at $108.10, down 13.6 percent from Tuesday’s close of $125.33.

Investors have been spooked by the increase in the company’s capital expenditure. At $18.37bn, it was a six-fold jump from last year, and much higher than the $13.2bn that analysts had forecast.

The majority of that investment, $15.8bn, is earmarked for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, which includes specialised compute, storage, networking and software systems required to build, train, deploy and operate AI models at scale. SpaceX has said it wants to increase the capacity of its data centres from 1.4GW currently to 2GW by year-end.

Investors across the technology sector are questioning whether the large investments in AI infrastructure will actually yield returns.

“We’ve watched the same scrutiny land on Big Tech this earnings season, where investors have questioned open-ended wallets and started demanding a visible return on them,” said Josh Gilbert, lead analyst at trading platform eToro.

“SpaceX faces that test with an added degree of difficulty because it’s asking shareholders to bankroll data centres in orbit.”

SpaceX has said its computing capacity not only serves its Grok models but is also actively sold, with $14.1bn in cloud-services agreements lined up.

The one area that SpaceX saw some profit was from the “connectivity” business, with revenue jumping 66 percent from a year earlier as the number of subscribers to its Starlink satellite communications service doubled to 12 million, bringing in $1.66bn in operating income.

SpaceX’s share price faces another test on Thursday, when the first tranche of the post-IPO lock-up expires, making up to 911.5 million shares, roughly 20 percent of restricted holdings, eligible for sale.

Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, told Al Jazeera that the stock is “likely to be volatile” once the lock-up lifts.

SpaceX’s IPO was priced at $135 per share and climbed to $225 within days of its June 12 debut, briefly catapulting Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. The stock has since dropped.