Analysis
Nvidia's latest regulatory filing, made Friday, disclosed a roughly $21 billion stake in SpaceX -- 122.8 million shares as of June 30 -- putting a public number on a position the market had only guessed at, according to Bloomberg. The same filing showed roughly 214.8 million shares of Intel worth about $30 billion, and confirmed Nvidia had fully exited its position in Arm, per Tom's Hardware.
The Intel stake started as a $5 billion purchase in September 2025, part of a strategic AI-infrastructure partnership between the two companies; it has since grown roughly sixfold as Intel's turnaround gathered momentum. The SpaceX position traces back further, to Nvidia's investment in Elon Musk's xAI, which was folded into SpaceX ahead of the company's record-setting $1.77 trillion IPO in June -- the same event Harvard's endowment disclosed its own $2.2 billion SpaceX stake around.
Both relationships come with strings attached: SpaceX and Intel have each pledged to make Nvidia their exclusive chip supplier, a commitment that turns Nvidia's equity stakes into a customer-retention tool as much as an investment. That puts Nvidia in a similar position to Microsoft and Amazon, both of which hold significant equity and compute-credit arrangements with the AI labs they supply cloud capacity to -- and it puts competitive pressure on AMD and Broadcom, which have been winning custom AI-accelerator contracts with hyperscalers looking to diversify away from single-vendor dependence.
Intel's own turnaround story is central to why the stake has grown so much: the company has leaned on Nvidia and other strategic partners as it rebuilds its foundry business against TSMC and Samsung, the two dominant contract chipmakers. A $5 billion bet that becomes a $30 billion stake in eleven months is an extraordinary return by any measure, but it also means Nvidia's balance sheet is now unusually concentrated -- Intel and SpaceX together make up roughly 80% of its disclosed U.S. equity holdings.
For investors, the read-through is less about Nvidia's stock-picking skill and more about how much of the AI capex boom is running through vendor financing rather than independent capital formation. Nvidia isn't simply selling chips to Intel and SpaceX -- it is, in effect, helping fund the demand for its own chips, a structure that works well as long as both companies' underlying businesses keep growing into the multiples the market is assigning them.
