SpaceX has secured a binding commitment for about $40 billion in financing for AI chips and related data center equipment, the company said in a regulatory filing Monday. An entity managed by New York private equity firm Apollo Global Management will purchase the chips and server hardware and then lease the equipment back to SpaceX. SpaceX described the arrangement as the largest committed GPU financing in a statement.
The leases will each run roughly five to five-and-a-quarter years, starting when each tranche of equipment is delivered, according to the filing. SpaceX expects the deal to close by year-end, subject to closing conditions, with leasing beginning in the first half of 2027 as the GPUs and related equipment arrive. Apollo said the financing will help deliver Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips for SpaceX's terrestrial compute buildout.
The arrangement gives SpaceX a way to fund its expanding AI ambitions without depending solely on traditional debt markets. CFO Bret Johnsen said the lease diversifies the company's funding sources and covers a notable portion of the funding needed for its growth plans. He also said SpaceX is seeing payback periods of less than one year on its AI infrastructure investments as it scales compute for Grok and its cloud services.
The deal lands after a strong third quarter for SpaceX's AI business, which includes the Grok chatbot, the Cursor coding tool and its cloud compute business. That segment beat investor expectations and contributed $7.6 billion of SpaceX's $14.6 billion in revenue, more than Starlink and rocket launches combined. Capital expenditures rose to nearly $20 billion from $6.9 billion a year earlier, and Johnsen said on the company's Oct. 20 earnings call that SpaceX expects to spend $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter alone.
The financing arrives amid turbulence in debt markets for AI infrastructure players, as investors grow uneasy about steep capital spending and limited profits. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk argued on Sunday that debt markets have largely shut out companies without major revenue streams outside of AI data centers, pointing to SpaceX's investment-grade status and cash flow from Starlink and rocket launches. He wrote on X that the more than 200 neocloud companies built solely to rent out GPUs for AI workloads face what he described as guppy-level death and consolidation, with few expected to survive.
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