SpaceX sounds out a $40 billion debt deal, led by Apollo, to buy Nvidia chips

SpaceX is in talks to raise about 40 billion dollars to buy Nvidia chips, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, with Apollo Global Management expected to lead the financing. The structure under discussion is about 10 billion dollars of bank loans and 30 billion dollars of investment-grade debt. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the talks, said Pimco is among the investment managers looking at the deal, that the conversations are early, and that they could end without a transaction. The FT said a close, if it happens, is expected in 2027.

The buyer is no longer a private rocket company. SpaceX listed in June in an 86 billion dollar IPO, the largest on record at the time, and trades as SPCX. The chip order is for the data-centre build tied to xAI, Elon Musk's separate artificial-intelligence company, whose computing Musk has said will run on Nvidia hardware only. Last month he said the Colossus 2 site could more than double its Nvidia chip count by December. A 40 billion dollar debt raise is the financing version of that sentence.

The scale is easier to read against the street's own estimate of the whole boom. Morgan Stanley has put the external financing needed for AI infrastructure at 1.5 trillion dollars by 2028. A single 40 billion dollar deal would be a large slice of one year's supply of that money, and it would be raised by a company whose listed business is launch and satellite broadband, against a chip purchase for a related private lab. Lenders looking at the paper have to decide which cash flow services it. The FT's sources described the debt as investment grade, which implies the banks and Apollo think SpaceX's own credit, not a guarantee from xAI, is the anchor.

Apollo's role, if the talks hold, is to lead and to place the debt with a wider set of buyers. Pimco's interest, reported but not confirmed by the firm, would put one of the largest bond managers on the list. That is a different buyer from the venture funds that financed the private years. Bond investors price a coupon and a maturity. They do not price a story about training runs. The caution the FT noted among lenders is already visible in that mix: a deal led by a private-credit and insurance platform, aimed at investment-grade accounts, rather than a convertible sold to growth funds.

The chip constraint is the reason the number is large. Nvidia's top processors are allocated, not ordered off a shelf. A buyer who wants a step-change in cluster size has to commit years ahead, and the commitment is a purchase order the supplier can finance against. Debt secured on, or raised for, that order lets SpaceX lock supply without funding the whole amount from the cash raised in June. It also adds a creditor class the June shareholders did not have. If the deal closes in 2027, the coupon will still be running when Colossus 2 is either full or late.

None of this is agreed. Bloomberg's sources said the talks could fail. The FT's 10-and-30 split could move. What is already on the record is Musk's December target for a larger Nvidia count at Colossus 2, the June listing, and a reported ask of 40 billion dollars led by Apollo. The ask is the new fact. It says the chip bill for the next stage of the build is being taken to the bond market, not to another equity round, and that the bill is large enough to sit among the biggest single financings of the current data-centre wave.

Shareholders who bought the June listing were buying launch cadence and Starlink cash flow. A 40 billion dollar chip facility, even if it sits at the SpaceX issuer, ties that equity to a purchase schedule set by Nvidia's allocation and by xAI's training calendar. The coupon, the 2027 target close, and the December chip-count line are the three dates a holder now has to track. Only one of them is a company announcement. The other two are still a newspaper report of talks.