SpaceX Signs $40 Billion Deal With Apollo to Finance AI Chip Buildout

SpaceX has signed a binding commitment to finance roughly $40 billion in artificial-intelligence computing equipment through an affiliate of Apollo Global Management, the company disclosed Monday, formalizing weeks of reported talks into a structured lease deal that will underwrite one of the largest corporate AI-hardware purchases attempted so far this year.

The arrangement, described in a current report SpaceX filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, covers a master finance lease under which an Apollo-managed entity will buy graphics-processing-unit pods and related server equipment and lease it back to SpaceX for installation at data centers the company selects. The filing states that the two sides entered into the binding commitment letter on October 24, with the fuller lease agreement still subject to unspecified closing conditions.

The mechanics of the deal

Under the structure laid out in the filing's text, equipment will arrive in tranches, each covered by its own lease schedule running roughly five to five-and-a-quarter years from delivery. Rent is payable quarterly, in advance, and will combine a portion of the financed equipment cost with interest at a fixed rate that has not yet been set; pricing will happen before SpaceX formally enters the master lease. Aggregate principal payments across all the schedules are expected to total about $40 billion, and the company said closing is anticipated before the end of the year, with the leases themselves not beginning until GPUs start arriving in the first half of 2027.

The size and shape of the package track closely with what the Financial Times first reported in early October, when it described SpaceX pursuing roughly $40 billion in financing, split between bank loans and investment-grade bonds, to pay for a large Nvidia chip order. Bloomberg reported Monday that the debt will ultimately be structured as private bonds issued through an off-balance-sheet entity, a financing technique several AI infrastructure buyers have leaned on this year to keep multibillion-dollar equipment commitments from weighing directly on their own balance sheets.

Part of a wider pattern

Apollo's involvement is not its first foray into chip-backed leasing tied to Elon Musk's companies. The asset manager has previously arranged smaller financing packages, in the single-digit billions, to buy Nvidia chips for xAI, Musk's artificial-intelligence venture, through similar lease-to-own vehicles. The SpaceX deal scales that same model up by roughly an order of magnitude, reflecting both the capital intensity of frontier AI computing and the growing willingness of private-credit firms to underwrite it.

SpaceX itself has had unusually direct access to that kind of capital since going public in June, when its $75 billion initial public offering — priced at $135 a share and valuing the company near $1.8 trillion at the time — became the largest stock-market debut on record. The company, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, has since pushed further into AI computing infrastructure alongside its satellite-internet and launch businesses, and its most recent quarterly report, filed with regulators on October 22, shows a company still spending heavily to build out that capacity.

A gap between the announcement and the filing

The rollout of the deal has not been entirely tidy. Elon Musk said on social media on Sunday that SpaceX had already "closed" the $40 billion in GPU debt financing, adding that the funds were earmarked mainly for chips arriving in the first and second quarters of next year and would not be "a major factor this quarter." SpaceX's own filing the next morning described something more conditional: a binding commitment letter toward a master lease whose closing still depends on conditions being met, with pricing of the fixed rate still to come. Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen, in comments reported alongside the filing, said the company still expects fourth-quarter capital expenditure of between $35 billion and $40 billion regardless of the financing's timing.

That gap between a founder's public claim and the more cautious language of a regulatory disclosure is not unusual at SpaceX, but it lands at a sensitive moment for AI-related credit. Analysts writing for Seeking Alpha, in a note republished Monday on TradingView, said the lease structure lets SpaceX expand its AI computing footprint without funding the full equipment cost upfront, but flagged open questions about future cash obligations, borrowing costs and whether demand for AI compute will ultimately generate returns large enough to justify the spending. Bloomberg's reporting placed the deal against the backdrop of what it called a rough week for AI companies in debt markets, with investors demanding larger premiums to finance the broader AI buildout — friction that people close to the talks said had complicated pricing discussions on the SpaceX transaction specifically.

Who is exposed, and what comes next

The arrangement matters most immediately to three sets of players: SpaceX's public shareholders, who are watching the company pour tens of billions into computing infrastructure alongside its traditional rocket and satellite work; Apollo and the bond investors expected to eventually hold pieces of the financing, who are underwriting equipment whose resale value depends on continued demand for Nvidia's current chip generation; and Nvidia itself, for which the order represents another large, financed customer commitment layered on top of a year already thick with similar arrangements across the AI industry.

For now, the practical sequence is straightforward even if the characterization of the deal is contested. SpaceX says it expects to finalize the master lease before year-end, with the fixed interest rate set at that point. The first GPU pods are not due to arrive, and the leases are not due to begin generating rent obligations, until sometime in the first half of 2027. Whether the deal's final terms match the roughly $40 billion figure both Musk and the company's own filing have now cited, and whether it closes on the timeline SpaceX has described, will depend on conditions the company has not detailed and on credit-market conditions that, by Bloomberg's account, were still unsettled as the filing was made public.