SpaceX locks in $40B to buy AI chips

SpaceX has secured a binding commitment for roughly $40 billion to buy AI chips and related data center equipment, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing on Monday, calling it the largest committed GPU financing ever.

The structure is unusual. An entity managed by Apollo Global Management, the New York-based private equity giant, will itself buy the chips and server hardware, then lease the gear back to SpaceX. The leases will run about five to five-and-a-quarter years, counted from the delivery of each tranche of equipment. SpaceX expects to close the deal by year-end, with lease payments starting in the first half of 2027 as the hardware arrives.

CFO Bret Johnsen said the lease diversifies the company's funding sources and covers a sizable portion of its capital needs. He noted that SpaceX is seeing payback periods of less than a year on its AI infrastructure as it scales compute for the Grok chatbot and its cloud services. Apollo said the money will help deliver Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips for SpaceX's "terrestrial compute buildout."

A record quarter

The deal follows an unusually strong third quarter for SpaceX's AI business. The segment — which bundles Grok, the Cursor coding tool, and the cloud operation — brought in $7.6 billion of the company's $14.6 billion in revenue, more than Starlink and rocket launches combined. Capital expenditures, meanwhile, surged to nearly $20 billion, up from $6.9 billion a year earlier. On the October 20 earnings call, Johnsen warned that the fourth quarter alone could see $35 billion to $40 billion in spending.

The agreement lands amid turbulence in the debt markets for AI infrastructure players, as investors grow uneasy about runaway spending paired with thin profits. SpaceX, by its own account, had no trouble raising the money — and Elon Musk seized the moment for a victory lap.

Citing the company's investment-grade status and steady cash flow from Starlink and launches, Musk argued on Sunday that debt markets have effectively closed to firms with no major revenue outside of AI data centers. That, he said, spells trouble for the more than 200 "neoclouds" built solely to rent out GPUs. "That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation," he wrote on X. "Some will make it through, but not many."

Source: TechCrunch