SpaceX is in talks to raise $40 billion in new debt financing to purchase Nvidia GPUs, in a deal led by Apollo Capital Management and a consortium of banks, according to reports from the Financial Times and CNBC2,3,5,6.
The financing would include approximately $10 billion in bank loans and roughly $30 billion in investment-grade debt. Discussions are preliminary, with key lenders and a timeline yet to be finalized.
A second debt raise in four months
The deal would mark SpaceX's second major debt issuance since its June IPO. Two weeks after that offering, SpaceX raised $25 billion in bonds at various durations to fund its AI operations, a sale that drew high demand from fixed-income investors. The company's AI ambitions include renting out compute capacity to customers such as Anthropic and Alphabet's Google. SpaceX has also inked compute deals with Cursor and Reflection AI[3].
But the borrowing pace is drawing scrutiny. SpaceX reported nearly $40 billion in existing debt in its second-quarter financials, and its credit risk has risen on concerns about the scale of its borrowing1. AI-related bonds have sold off since the June issuance, and credit spreads have widened. SpaceX's existing debt now trades near junk bond levels, according to one report.
GPU collateral and the compute buildout
The $40 billion deal will likely use the purchased GPUs themselves as collateral. The chips would feed SpaceX's Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, which was running 230,000 Nvidia AI chips before an expansion to 550,000 chips in the Colossus 2 configuration. Elon Musk has said plans call for more than doubling the chip count to 1.21 million by late December.
Jim Cramer, citing the deal on CNBC, said SpaceX's GPU purchases reinforce the bull case for Nvidia. "The more Nvidia [that SpaceX] buys, the more money it makes," Cramer said, adding that Musk is following the strategy Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has outlined: "Buy our compute and then lend it, and you'll make a fortune".
ANALYSIS A $40 billion GPU purchase on top of $25 billion in bonds issued just months earlier would make SpaceX one of the most leveraged buyers of AI infrastructure globally, concentrating both opportunity and credit risk in a single entity that is simultaneously scaling rocket launches, satellite broadband, and a compute-rental business.