SpaceX discusses $40 billion financing for Nvidia chips

CNBC reported that Apollo Capital Management and several banks were discussing financing SpaceX’s planned $40 billion Nvidia GPU purchase.[1] CNBC said the discussions were preliminary and that the lenders and other key details had not been finalized.[1] It reported that Apollo was playing a leading role in facilitating the financing, while Apollo declined to comment.[1] Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment, CNBC reported.[1] CNBC said the Financial Times was the first to report the talks.[1]

CNBC reported that the financing would rely primarily on investment-grade debt and that Nvidia GPUs would likely serve as collateral.[1] The Inference reported a possible package of about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt.[3] That breakdown is a reported possibility, not a finalized structure: CNBC said key details had yet to be settled.[1] The Inference also reported that the financing would not close until 2027.[3] For teams assessing the proposal, the reported timing and structure should therefore be treated as provisional.

SpaceX raised $25 billion in bonds two weeks after its mid-June IPO, and CNBC reported that the sale drew very high demand from fixed-income investors.[1] Since that sale, AI-related bonds have sold off and credit spreads have widened, CNBC reported.[1] Fixed-income investors have been demanding higher yields for AI-related debt, a sign of greater selectivity about AI exposure, according to CNBC.[1] SpaceX had reported nearly $40 billion of debt in its second-quarter financials, and CNBC said its existing debt was trading near junk-bond levels.[1] Those conditions make the proposed financing’s final terms worth watching.

Elon Musk said SpaceX’s Colossus data center in Memphis was running 230,000 Nvidia AI chips, while Colossus 2 had 550,000.[1] He said SpaceX planned to more than double its chip count to 1.21 million by late December, if it got lucky.[1] CNBC reported that SpaceX had compute deals with Google, Anthropic, Reflection AI and Cursor, which SpaceX later bought.[1] The market expected GPUs to retain their value for about seven years, and CNBC reported that scarce computing power supported the value of high-performing GPUs.[1] These factors may inform how lenders assess the proposed collateral, but the reported financing terms remain unsettled.[1]