SpaceX Seeks $40 Billion Led by Apollo to Buy Nvidia Chips: How It Compares With xAI's GPU Lease Deals

SpaceX is seeking about $40 billion of financing, led by Apollo Global Management, to pay for an order of Nvidia AI chips, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, in a story carried that evening by Reuters and Seeking Alpha. MoveSurge published the headline at 6:30 p.m. ET; the reported package is about $10 billion of bank loans and $30 billion of investment-grade debt, and the transaction is expected to close in 2027.

How the SpaceX $40 billion Apollo financing for Nvidia chips is built

According to the FT report as relayed by Reuters, Apollo would lead the deal and help place the debt with a broad range of investors, and the bond manager Pimco is among a small group of lenders in talks to provide money. Three quarters of the package would be investment-grade debt, a market SpaceX entered in June 2026. Before that debut it obtained investment-grade ratings from Moody's, S&P and Fitch, then priced $25 billion of senior unsecured notes in five tranches maturing between 2031 and 2056, mainly to repay the bridge loan tied to its acquisition of xAI. The chip financing would be 1.6 times the size of that first bond sale.

The published accounts of the report describe loans and bonds. They do not describe a lease or a separate company that would own the chips, the structure used in the three Nvidia chip financings for xAI reported between October 2025 and February 2026.

Earlier GPU-backed financings for xAI and others

In the xAI deals the borrower was a vehicle that bought the GPUs and rented them out, so lenders were repaid from lease payments and backed by the hardware rather than by xAI itself. The October 2025 plan paired up to $12.5 billion of debt with about $7.5 billion of equity. The February 2026 report described triple-net terms, under which xAI pays for upkeep, taxes and insurance, and Apollo's January release said Nvidia invested in the Valor Compute Infrastructure fund as an anchor limited partner.

The reported SpaceX package is more than eleven times Apollo's January 2026 loan and about three times the debt planned for the October 2025 vehicle. In that same January release, Apollo said its funds had deployed over $40 billion into next-generation infrastructure, including compute capacity, since 2022; the SpaceX deal alone would roughly equal that total.

Where Nvidia's chip demand is being financed

On August 10, 2026, Nvidia announced financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR intended to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure, through dedicated pools of capital for Nvidia customers. The partnerships were subject to final agreements, and the published accounts of the FT report do not say whether the SpaceX financing runs through Apollo's platform.

Nvidia is also a shareholder in the buyer. It disclosed in mid-August 2026 about 122.8 million SpaceX Class A shares, worth about $21 billion at the end of June, acquired through its January 2026 investment in xAI before the merger. Musk said in September that the Colossus 2 data center could more than double its count of Nvidia chips by December, and SpaceX plans to use Nvidia hardware exclusively in its data centers. The lead lender on the $40 billion is one of Nvidia's six financing partners, the borrower counts Nvidia among its shareholders, and the money is earmarked for Nvidia chips, with closing expected in 2027.