SpaceX Seeks $40 Billion in Debt to Buy Nvidia Chips
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Rockets are expensive, but A.I. data centers cost even more: According to a report by The Financial Times, SpaceX is negotiating financing of about $40 billion (roughly €35.5 billion) so that Elon Musk’s company can buy chips from Nvidia. The private equity firm Apollo Global Management is leading the deal.
$10 Billion in Loans, $30 Billion in Bonds
According to the report, the package would consist of roughly $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt. The bond giant Pimco is among the lenders in talks. The deal is expected to close in 2027.
SpaceX plans to use the money to expand its A.I. data centers. Mr. Musk has said the company will use Nvidia hardware exclusively. The number of Nvidia chips at the Colossus 2 data center alone is set to more than double by December. Since merging with Mr. Musk’s A.I. company xAI, which now operates as SpaceXAI, SpaceX has itself become one of the biggest buyers of A.I. computing power.
Apollo, Nvidia and SpaceX Are Closely Intertwined
This is not Apollo’s first chip deal with Mr. Musk. Earlier this year, the investor financed two deals of about $3.5 billion each for xAI’s Nvidia clusters. Apollo is also working with Nvidia on consortia meant to finance hundreds of billions of dollars in A.I. infrastructure. Nvidia, in turn, holds a stake in SpaceX that was most recently worth about $21 billion.
SpaceX does not use all of its computing power itself. It rents part of it to third parties, including, since the spring, the entire Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic. That business is likely to grow as the company expands. In the second quarter alone, SpaceX spent $15.8 billion on computing infrastructure, according to its quarterly results.
A Cool Reception on the Stock Market
Investors reacted cautiously. SpaceX shares, which have traded on the Nasdaq since the company’s I.P.O. in June, fell about 1 percent to just under $170 after the report, while Nvidia rose 0.5 percent. The question on investors’ minds: How much debt can a space company take on as it increasingly turns into an operator of A.I. data centers?
A Multibillion-Dollar Market for Debt
SpaceX is not alone in its appetite for debt. In 2025, Meta teamed up with Blue Owl on $27 billion in financing for its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, and cloud providers such as CoreWeave have long financed their chips with loans secured by the GPUs themselves. In the first half of the year alone, the big tech companies issued about $200 billion in investment-grade bonds to fund their A.I. buildout. Morgan Stanley estimates that A.I. infrastructure will require about $1.5 trillion in outside financing by 2028. For Nvidia, that is a comfortable business: The more money the financial industry pours into data centers, the longer its order books stay full.
