Analysis
SpaceX is in talks to raise roughly $40 billion in financing arranged by Apollo Global Management to fund a major Nvidia chip order, the Financial Times reported, per WSAU. Neither SpaceX, Apollo nor Nvidia confirmed the terms to Reuters.
The structure described: bank loans make up roughly a quarter of the total, with the remainder in investment-grade debt, and a close targeted for 2027.
Apollo is becoming the house bank for Musk's compute
This isn't Apollo's first chip-financing deal tied to Musk. In February, Apollo arranged a roughly $3.4 billion loan to an investment vehicle that buys Nvidia chips and leases them to xAI -- a sale-leaseback structure that keeps the chips off xAI's own balance sheet while still letting it use them. The SpaceX deal, at roughly ten times the size, suggests Apollo is scaling the same playbook across Musk's companies rather than treating xAI as a one-off.
Pimco is reportedly among the lenders considering the debt, which matters because of SpaceX's credit profile: its BBB rating, the second-lowest investment-grade tier, opens the paper to insurance and pension funds that are typically restricted from taking large positions in junk-rated notes. SpaceX's own bonds sold off in the days after an earlier offering on concerns about the company's mounting debt and heavy capital spending -- a detail that complicates the pitch for $30 billion more in investment-grade paper.
The vendor-financed AI buildout, at scale
Nvidia disclosed separately that it's helping assemble more than $500 billion from a consortium including Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to finance its own customers' purchases of its chips. Nvidia also holds an equity stake in SpaceX directly -- an SEC filing shows roughly 122.8 million SpaceX Class A shares, a position Pulse has covered previously as it's grown. That means Nvidia is now financier, supplier and shareholder in the same transaction chain, a concentration of exposure that would alarm regulators in almost any other industry.
What the reported structure misses: this is debt, not equity, and debt has to be serviced regardless of whether SpaceX's AI and compute ambitions generate revenue on the timeline its spending assumes. A $40 billion raise to buy chips is a bet that compute demand keeps outrunning supply long enough to justify the leverage -- and SpaceX's own bond wobble this year is a live data point on how thin that confidence already is among fixed-income investors.
