SpaceX Wants to Borrow $40 Billion for Nvidia Chips After Spending Eight Times the Cash Its Business Made

SpaceX is going to the debt markets to keep buying Nvidia chips. Elon Musk's rocket and AI company is seeking to raise $40 billion for the hardware, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, split into roughly $10 billion of bank loans and $30 billion of investment-grade debt.

Apollo Global Management is expected to lead and help market the debt, with Pimco among a small group of lenders in talks. The deal is expected to close in 2027. Neither SpaceX nor Nvidia confirmed it, and no terms beyond the split have surfaced.

Shares fell about 1% after hours. SPCX trades around $172, comfortably above its $135 IPO price but well off its all-time high near $226.

A rocket company that mostly buys servers

The borrowing makes more sense once you look at where SpaceX's money goes. Since folding in xAI in February and going public earlier this year, the company has turned into one of the biggest AI spenders on the planet.

Second-quarter capital spending was $18.4 billion. Of that, $15.8 billion, about 86%, went to AI infrastructure. Starlink got roughly $1.4 billion and the space business about $1.2 billion.

Over the first half, SpaceX spent about $28.5 billion while its operations generated only about $3.5 billion of cash. Put differently, for every dollar the business brought in, about eight went out the door. That gap is the hole the new debt is meant to help fill.

And the pace is not slowing. CFO Bret Johnsen said on the August 4 earnings call that the next two quarters should look "very similar," which points to full-year capex near $65 billion. He argued new compute pays for itself in less than a year, and the company is targeting a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by year-end.

One supplier, one bet

Musk made the chip choice explicit on that same call: SpaceX had "decided to build exclusively on Nvidia" for its AI work, and he called Vera Rubin the best AI architecture around.

The chips land in SpaceX's Colossus data centers, where it trains its Grok models and rents capacity to other AI developers, chiefly Anthropic and Google. In other words, the company people still picture launching rockets is now mostly an AI landlord, and its tenants include two of its biggest rivals.

Debt-for-chips is quickly becoming the industry's financing template. Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease the very chips Broadcom sells, and regulators have noticed: the Bank of England has warned that AI-linked borrowing has hit $450 billion this year.

SpaceX's version is the starkest yet. A company burning eight dollars for every one its business brings in is asking some of Wall Street's biggest lenders for $40 billion more, all of it headed to a single chip supplier.