SpaceX is seeking about $40 billion in debt financing to buy Nvidia AI chips, with Apollo Global Management expected to lead the deal and Pimco among a small group of lenders in talks, according to reports citing people familiar with the matter. The package would split into roughly $10 billion of bank loans and $30 billion of investment-grade bonds aimed at closing sometime in 2027.
The Financial Times first reported the plan, and other outlets wired it soon after. None of the companies has confirmed it. Apollo and Pimco declined requests for comment, and SpaceX and Nvidia have not responded. That leaves a reported deal, not a signed one, but the figures are specific and the parties named are real.
Where the numbers come from
SpaceX went public in June at an $86 billion IPO and picked up an investment-grade credit rating of BBB shortly after. Within two weeks of listing, it raised $25 billion in bonds at several durations, a sale that reportedly saw heavy demand from fixed-income buyers. CNBC reported at the time that investors wanted more paper from the company. If the $40 billion Nvidia package closes, it would tap the same investment-grade debt market, with the GPUs themselves likely serving as collateral.
Musk committed SpaceX to Nvidia hardware in August. “We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia,” he said on the company’s earnings call, framing the choice around Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture being the best available. A buyer that has publicly bound itself to one supplier ordering $40 billion of that supplier’s chips is the reason vendors and their financing partners have taken such a direct interest in each other’s balance sheets.
| Detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total financing sought | $40 billion |
| Bank loans | $10 billion |
| Investment-grade bonds | $30 billion |
| Expected close | 2027 |
| First-half capex on files | $28.5 billion |
| First-half operating cash | $3.5 billion |
The arithmetic underneath
SpaceX folded in Musk’s xAI business in February. SpaceX rents the Colossus compute clusters that xAI built to outside customers, chiefly Anthropic and Google, while also training its own Grok models on the same hardware. Anthropic pays about $1.25 billion a month for roughly 325,000 GPUs and could owe as much as $84.5 billion through 2029 under the commitment. Google pays roughly $920 million a month for about 110,000 GPUs. Both contracts let the customer walk away on 90 days’ notice after an initial locked period.
That mismatch between what SpaceX owes and what it rents out is the risk in the deal. SpaceX has some $28 billion of noncancelable purchase commitments on its books, about $22.2 billion of which matures in 2027, the same year the new financing would close. Meanwhile the revenue side depends on tenants who can leave within a quarter. Musk has talked about SpaceX eventually earning $3 billion to $4 billion a month renting out AI compute, a figure Jim Cramer of CNBC floated and which does not appear in any SpaceX filing, so it is a claim rather than guidance.
The capex picture helps explain why external debt is on the table at all. SpaceX spent about $28.5 billion in the first half of 2026, on filings that showed $10.1 billion in the first quarter and $18.4 billion in the second, against roughly $3.5 billion of operating cash over the same stretch. A company spending nearly ten times its operating cash on hardware is not going to fund that gap from internal sources for long.
Apollo’s expanding role in AI hardware
Apollo has been building a position as the bank for AI compute. In June it led a $35 billion financing to buy processors from Nvidia rival Broadcom, described at the time as the largest private credit deal. In August, Nvidia announced work with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR on financing platforms meant to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure. Apollo also financed about $7 billion of GPU clusters for xAI’s Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. Nvidia itself holds about $21 billion of SpaceX stock, which makes the vendor a shareholder in its own largest reported customer.
Apollo runs one of the largest private credit franchises in the world, with roughly $800 billion in credit assets under management, and it has led comparable financings for Intel and Bayer. Its life insurance and annuity affiliate Athene typically takes a large chunk of this kind of high-grade issuance, which is one reason Apollo can move deals of this size quickly where a traditional bank syndicate would need more time.
Morgan Stanley has estimated AI infrastructure buildouts will need $1.5 trillion in external financing by 2028. The SpaceX ask is one slice of that, though a visible one, because it turns compute spending from a line item in a tech company’s capex into something closer to aircraft or power plant financing, long-lived assets backed by contracts.
What to watch
Nothing has closed. The deal could change shape or fall apart before 2027, and the parties have been careful to say nothing publicly. The markers to watch are whether SpaceX, Apollo or Nvidia confirm any part of it, how the bonds price if they do launch, and whether the tenants with 90-day exit rights stay. SpaceX stock traded down about 1 percent after hours on October 6 when the report surfaced, to around $172, a muted reaction that reflects how much of the AI financing story investors had already priced in.