SpaceX locks in $40B GPU financing deal with Apollo

SpaceX has lined up roughly $40 billion in financing for AI chips and related data center gear, according to a Monday regulatory filing. The company called it the largest committed GPU financing it has seen. Apollo Global Management will back the purchase through an entity it manages, buy the chips and server hardware, and lease the equipment back to SpaceX.

The leases are set to run for about five to five-and-a-quarter years, starting when each batch of equipment is delivered. SpaceX expects the deal to close by year-end if the closing conditions are met. The first leases should begin in the first half of 2027, when the GPUs and related equipment arrive.

This gives SpaceX another funding path as it pushes deeper into AI infrastructure. Bret Johnsen, the company’s CFO, said the lease broadens its funding sources and covers a meaningful slice of what it needs for growth. He also said the company is seeing payback periods of less than a year on its AI infrastructure as it scales compute for Grok and its cloud services.

Apollo said the money will help deliver Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips for SpaceX’s terrestrial compute buildout. The timing lines up with a company that is spending aggressively across AI, Starlink and launches. In the third quarter, SpaceX’s AI segment brought in $7.6 billion of the company’s $14.6 billion in revenue, more than Starlink and rocket launches combined, while capital expenditures climbed to nearly $20 billion from $6.9 billion a year earlier. Johnsen said on the company’s Oct. 20 earnings call that fourth-quarter spending could reach $35 billion to $40 billion.

The deal also lands in a tense moment for AI infrastructure financing. Investors have been getting wary of huge capex and thin profits, but SpaceX clearly still had room to borrow. Musk used the announcement to jab at the more than 200 neocloud companies that rent out GPUs, arguing that firms without big revenue streams outside AI data centers are in trouble. It’s a neat reminder that in this market, cash flow still beats swagger. Even when the swagger belongs to Elon Musk.