SpaceX eyes a $40B loan mix to bulk up xAI Nvidia compute

The reported plan splits the money in two. About $10 billion would come as loans from banks, and about $30 billion would be raised by selling investment-grade bonds, debt that ratings agencies consider relatively safe for investors.

Apollo Global Management, a large private investment firm, is expected to lead the deal and help place the debt with a wide range of investors. Bond giant Pimco is among a small group of lenders said to be in talks. The deal is expected to close in 2027.

There is a big caveat. The talks were described as preliminary, and there is no guarantee a deal will happen. SpaceX, Apollo and Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment, and Pimco declined to comment.

The money would buy Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin hardware. xAI usually buys whole server racks rather than loose chips, so one useful way to picture it is in Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, Nvidia’s rack-sized machines that each hold 72 accelerators (chips built to run AI).

At an estimated $8 million per rack, $40 billion would cover about 5,000 racks containing roughly 360,000 Rubin accelerators. That is an outside estimate, not a figure from SpaceX, and it’s unclear whether $40 billion is the whole compute budget for 2027 or just part of it.

For scale, Musk said in September that xAI’s Colossus 2 data center near Memphis holds 110,000 Nvidia GB200 chips and 440,000 GB300 chips, and that the count could more than double by December. Musk has also said SpaceX will build its data centers exclusively on Nvidia hardware, praising the Vera Rubin design as the best available.

This isn’t a cash crunch. As of June, SpaceX held $93.5 billion in cash plus $6.5 billion in short-term investments, much of it from its record $86 billion stock market debut that same month. But it is spending at a ferocious pace.

• Spending: capital expenditure, the money spent on buildings and equipment, hit $18.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up from $2.9 billion a year earlier. At that rate, $40 billion would last about six and a half months.
• Debt: total debt was $39.7 billion in June. Adding the full $40 billion, with nothing else changing, would roughly double it to about $80 billion.
• Cost: SpaceX would be borrowing with the 10-year Treasury yield near 5.3 percent, close to its highest level in more than two decades, which makes debt more expensive.

Borrowing lets SpaceX keep its IPO cash as a safety cushion. It is also betting the chips will pay for themselves. SpaceX has been renting out computing power, signing a deal worth $1.1 billion a month with an unnamed customer, plus earlier agreements with Anthropic worth $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 and with Google worth $920 million a month through June 2029.

Nvidia isn’t just the supplier here. It also owns a piece of SpaceX. It disclosed about 122.8 million SpaceX shares in August, worth about $21 billion, a stake that came from its 2025 investment in xAI before SpaceX absorbed the company.

Apollo, the expected lead lender, is also one of six firms Nvidia teamed up with in August, alongside BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, to set up financing platforms meant to raise more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. Apollo previously arranged a $7 billion financing deal with xAI for the Nvidia chips headed to Colossus 2.

In other words, money from investors flows through lenders tied to Nvidia, to a company partly owned by Nvidia, to buy Nvidia chips. That’s not illegal or unusual in itself, but it shows how tightly the AI economy is wound around one supplier.

For ordinary people, the clearest effect is indirect. Orders on this scale decide who gets Nvidia’s newest chips first, and therefore whose AI tools improve fastest. And the debt doesn’t stay with the banks. Investment-grade bonds commonly end up in the funds behind retirement and pension savings.

Morgan Stanley estimates AI infrastructure will need $1.5 trillion in outside financing by 2028, even as some lenders grow more cautious. Oracle is following the same playbook, aiming to bring in between $45 billion and $50 billion this year through a mix of borrowing and share sales. Deals like SpaceX’s are a test of how long that appetite lasts.

Markets took the report calmly. SpaceX shares fell about 1 percent in after-hours trading and around 2 percent before the market opened the next day, while Nvidia rose slightly.