SpaceX wants to borrow US$40 billion to buy Nvidia's chips, and its shares fell 2.51%

SpaceX Nvidia

SpaceX fell 2.51% to US$167.60 on Wednesday. Late on Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the company is seeking about US$40 billion of debt to buy Nvidia chips for its AI data centres.

Who lends that much money? About US$10 billion would come from bank loans and US$30 billion from investment-grade debt, the kind ratings agencies judge safer. Apollo Global Management is expected to lead, Pimco is in talks to take part, and the deal is due to close in 2027.

The spending is already bigger than the business. In the June quarter SpaceX spent US$18.37 billion on new assets, US$15.83 billion of it on AI, against revenue of US$7.81 billion.

Chart: SpaceX's AI arm spent far beyond its sales. Capital spending and revenue by segment, three months to June 2026, in US$ millions; Connectivity is Starlink. A year earlier AI spent US$749m. — This story’s chart of the day: the numbers, the dark version and the animated version are on its own page. The chart’s page →

xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot, is now part of SpaceX. Elon Musk has said its Colossus 2 data centre could more than double the number of Nvidia chips it runs by December.

The money also goes round in a circle. Nvidia disclosed a stake of nearly US$21 billion in SpaceX in August, built up through its investment in xAI, and SpaceX now wants to borrow to buy Nvidia's products.

The catch

Nvidia brings out a faster chip roughly every year, and this debt will be around for far longer than that. Morgan Stanley reckons AI infrastructure will need US$1.5 trillion of outside financing by 2028, so SpaceX is unlikely to be the last to ask.

This story ran in A Lender's Market Thursday 8 October’s edition, with the market snapshot, the other two stories, the numbers and the week ahead. Read the whole edition →

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