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SpaceX reportedly in talks to borrow $40 billion to buy NVIDIA chips
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Elon Musk is looking to borrow for SpaceX: banks and investors are weighing $40 billion in funding that would go toward NVIDIA processors, according to the Financial Times. The deal, still in its first steps, would mix bank credit with low-risk bonds, with Apollo Global Management in charge and Pimco weighing a stake. It may never be signed and, if it is, it would close in 2027.
SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, is in talks with banks and investors to raise $40 billion of debt to buy chips from NVIDIA, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, October 6, in a story later picked up by Bloomberg.
The plan, still at an early stage, would combine roughly $10 billion in bank loans with $30 billion in investment-grade debt (debt from companies seen as having a low risk of default). Apollo Global Management would lead the deal, and asset manager Pimco is among the investors considering it. The talks could still end without an agreement; if they go ahead, the financing would close in 2027.
Musk folded xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot and the Colossus supercomputers, into SpaceX earlier this year. SpaceX went public in June with a record $86 billion IPO and later sold $25 billion of bonds, according to TechStartups. The outlet notes that Musk said last month the Colossus 2 data center could more than double its NVIDIA chip count by December, and that the company will use NVIDIA hardware exclusively in its data centers.
In August, NVIDIA partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR on financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure projects. TechStartups ranks the SpaceX deal among the largest debt financings tied to the AI infrastructure buildout.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Until now, the artificial intelligence race was measured by who secured the most processors; this deal suggests the bottleneck is shifting to money. A company that has only just gone public turning to loans, and not only to its own funds, shows that not even the biggest groups pay for this infrastructure out of what they earn. For NVIDIA it is another sign that its sales depend more and more on what banks and asset managers are willing to finance. It should be read with caution: these are early-stage talks that may come to nothing. For people who use AI services the effect would be indirect, and it remains to be seen whether the cost of that debt ends up showing in what they pay to use them.
Source: Bloomberg · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
