SpaceX is reportedly looking to raise about $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips for its data centers. The Financial Times reported the plan on Tuesday, October 6, and Reuters carried the details. Investment firm Apollo Global Management is expected to lead the deal. SpaceX, Apollo and Nvidia had not commented at the time of the reports.
How the money would be raised
This is borrowing, not a share sale. The package is described as about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, with Apollo helping place the debt with investors. Bond fund Pimco is reportedly among a small group of lenders in talks. The deal is expected to close in 2027, and the reports do not say it has been signed.
The reports do not say how many chips would be bought or which models. They also give no interest rates or other terms. SpaceX shares slipped about 1% in after-hours trading, while Nvidia rose about 0.5%.
Why Nvidia, and why now
On its last earnings call, SpaceX said it will build “exclusively on Nvidia hardware.” The company spent about $18.4 billion on capital projects in the second quarter, with roughly $15.8 billion of that going to computing power, according to Yahoo Finance. SpaceX went public in June in a record IPO of about $86 billion, which we covered in our trillionaire story.
Our take: the useful way to read $40 billion is against SpaceX’s own spending. At the second-quarter pace of $15.8 billion on computing, it is about two and a half quarters of chip buying. That makes it a routine-sized bill for a company building at this scale, not a one-off. It also shows how the chip race is now being paid for with debt as much as cash. The thing to watch is whether lenders keep their appetite, since Reuters notes they are becoming more cautious about this kind of spending.
For more on the company behind the numbers, read SpaceXAI Is Becoming SpaceXSI.
