- SpaceX is reportedly seeking $40B in loans and bonds to buy Nvidia AI chips.
- Apollo is expected to lead, with $10B from banks and $30B in investment-grade debt.
- Nvidia is both SpaceX’s chip supplier and one of its shareholders.
SpaceX is in talks to raise about $40 billion to pay for a huge order of Nvidia AI chips, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
About $10 billion would come from bank loans and $30 billion from investment-grade debt, meaning bonds that credit agencies rate as low risk.
Apollo is expected to lead the deal and help place the debt with a broad range of investors. Bond fund Pimco is among a small group of lenders in talks, and the FT expects the transaction to close in 2027.
A $101B cash pile, and still borrowing
SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in its June IPO, including shares sold when underwriters used their overallotment option. The stock priced at $135, valuing the company at just under $1.8 trillion, and its market value topped $2.2 trillion by June 15.
It then sold $25 billion of investment-grade bonds in its first public bond offering, drawing about $89 billion in orders, to refinance a $20 billion bridge loan tied to the xAI acquisition. The company also disclosed about $101 billion in cash on June 19.
So why borrow another $40 billion? The IPO filing hints at the answer. SpaceX spent $10.1 billion on capital projects in the first quarter of 2026, with $7.72 billion going to AI, and lost $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said he expects the IPO to be the last time SpaceX sells shares, according to City AM. That leaves debt as the likelier route.
The chips have a destination. Musk wrote on X on September 25 that xAI’s Colossus 2 cluster near Memphis runs 110,000 Nvidia GB200 chips and 440,000 of the newer GB300 chips, 550,000 in all. He listed three more batches of 220,000 GB300 chips: one the following week, one in November and, “if we get lucky,” one in late December. Hit all three and the site passes 1.2 million chips.
The schedule is Musk’s own and has not been independently verified. On SpaceX’s first earnings call, he said the company had decided “to build exclusively on Nvidia.”
Nvidia sits on every side of the order
Nvidia is SpaceX’s chip supplier and a shareholder. A regulatory filing made public in August showed it holds about 122.8 million SpaceX Class A shares, worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June. The stake traces back to Nvidia’s $10 billion investment in xAI’s $20 billion funding round in January, which became SpaceX stock when SpaceX bought xAI in an all-stock deal. At mid-August prices, it was worth about $17 billion.
Nvidia is also building the lending machine that could fund orders like this one. On August 10, it announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to set up financing platforms meant to mobilise more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure over time.
The wider pattern is easy to count. Nvidia’s equity investments reached about $99 billion as of July 26. Tech Funding News reported that Nvidia committed more than $40 billion to AI-related deals in 2026, including $30 billion in OpenAI, $2 billion each in CoreWeave and Nebius, and $2 billion each in Marvell, Lumentum, and Coherent, which supply connectivity and optical parts. The CoreWeave and Nebius investments each targeted more than five gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Bloomberg called the CoreWeave deal another example of “circular financing,” where a supplier funds the customers that buy its product.
AI’s funding race is moving to the debt markets
Morgan Stanley has put the AI infrastructure build-out at roughly $3 trillion between 2025 and 2028, with about half needing outside financing, according to credit research firm Octus. That is about $1.5 trillion of external money.
Smaller builders are borrowing too. Nscale, the London-based AI cloud provider, was reported on September 4 to be seeking up to $3.5 billion before its IPO: up to $1.5 billion in convertible notes led by hedge fund Third Point and about $2 billion from Nvidia. It filed for a New York Stock Exchange listing on September 18, and CoinDesk has reported more than $3 billion of convertible financing, including $1 billion from Nvidia. Nebius sold $4 billion of convertible notes in March after upsizing the deal from $3.75 billion, then closed a $5.75 billion offering in August.
The same lenders are circling other AI names. BlackRock is in talks to back OpenAI’s $30 billion round at a fixed $1.4 trillion price, and Blackstone is among the investors eyed for Nvidia-backed Lambda’s $4 billion raise ahead of a 2027 IPO. Anthropic’s backers, meanwhile, are eyeing a $2 trillion IPO valuation after SpaceX’s debut.
The SpaceX financing is not final, and the FT does not expect it to close until 2027. The harder question comes after the chips arrive: whether the data centres that house them fill with paying customers.
