Analysis
SpaceX has closed on $40 billion in debt financing to buy Nvidia GPUs and data-center equipment, entering a binding commitment letter with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday, according to a Dow Jones report carried by Morningstar. SpaceX will make quarterly payments over roughly five years, with aggregate principal of about $40 billion, excluding interest.
The financing comes as Elon Musk warned that credit is drying up across the AI infrastructure sector. "The 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation," Musk wrote, adding "some will make it through, but not many," according to Tech Startups. He contrasted SpaceX's own position, writing the company is "investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue" backing the new debt -- a distinction Musk argues most AI-only infrastructure providers can't make.
How big is SpaceX's AI business now?
SpaceX's AI segment, branded Super Intelligence, generated $7.56 billion in third-quarter revenue, up from $813 million a year earlier, CNBC has reported -- making it SpaceX's largest business unit, ahead of Starlink and launch services.
Reuters reports SpaceX expects capital expenditures of $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter alone, roughly matching the size of Monday's new GPU financing.
- SpaceX's SPV structure echoes two other financings struck the same Monday:
- Anthropic -- a $63 billion vehicle to lease Broadcom AI chips, also running through a special-purpose entity.
- Meta -- a $35 billion stock-and-preferred offering, with room to sell up to $95 billion total through a separate at-the-market program.
Anthropic and SpaceX are borrowing against hardware they'll lease; Meta is diluting shareholders directly. Both approaches say the same thing: GPU buildouts have grown too large for even the biggest AI balance sheets to fund from cash flow alone.
SpaceX's own equity base dwarfs the new debt: it went public in June at a $1.77 trillion valuation and generated $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue, up roughly 50% year over year, per Pulse's earlier Starlink-and-earnings coverage.
Even so, the new $40 billion lease commitment is larger than the market cap of most S&P 500 companies -- financed through an SPV specifically so it doesn't show up as SpaceX debt.
However, Bloomberg reported two days before Musk's announcement that the financing package had hit snags amid credit-market turmoil and rising borrowing costs, and SpaceX still hasn't disclosed the final interest rate or full terms of the deal. The GPUs being financed are arriving in the first two quarters of 2027 -- committing SpaceX to five years of lease payments on hardware that typically depreciates, functionally, within two to three years of heavy AI workloads.
Goldman Sachs led discussions with potential financing partners before Apollo's entity signed on, Bloomberg reported, the same investment bank that's been shopping similar GPU-lease structures to other hyperscalers this fall.