SpaceX Seeks $40 Billion in Apollo-Led Debt to Buy Nvidia Chips — Among the Biggest AI Buildout Financings Ever

SpaceX Seeks $40 Billion in Apollo-Led Debt to Buy Nvidia Chips — Among the Biggest AI Buildout Financings Ever

Financial Times (Tuesday, October 6, 2026, via Reuters): Elon Musk's SpaceX — public since its record $86 billion June IPO — plans to raise $40 billion, led by Apollo Global Management, to purchase Nvidia AI chips, "in what would be among the biggest-ever debt financings for the AI buildout" (Bloomberg). The structure per FT: about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion of investment-grade debt¹, with bond giant Pimco among a small group of lenders in talks; the transaction is expected to close in 2027. SpaceX, Apollo and Nvidia had not responded to Reuters' requests for comment; Pimco declined.

Market reaction was a shrug: SPCX fell 1% in extended trading; Nvidia rose 0.5%.

The context lines in Reuters' recap are the real story. Morgan Stanley "estimates AI infrastructure will require $1.5 trillion in external financing by 2028, even as lenders and investors grow more cautious about funding the industry's expansion." Musk has said SpaceX plans to use Nvidia hardware exclusively to build its data centers, and said last month that xAI's Colossus 2 "could more than double the number of Nvidia chips it uses by December." And Nvidia itself is now a financing actor: in August it partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR on financing platforms "intended to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure projects."

Why it matters: the debt-financing wave in AI capex now has a new tier. Hyperscalers are borrowing at record scale and exploring off-balance-sheet SPVs (The AI Capex Debt Machine Widens: Broadcom Raising $50B+ for OpenAI's "Nexus" Chips, Oracle's Leaseback Talks — and Apollo Is in All Three Deals — Amazon's $8B Grace Blackwell leaseback talks); now Musk's post-IPO SpaceX is tapping the investment-grade market at $40B for chips alone, with first-half spending already reported around $28.5B against only ~$3.5B of operating cash flow (Yahoo Finance/Stocktwits). A committed $40B buyer is a demand signal Nvidia needs amid rising custom-silicon competition; for everyone else it is another marker of how much of the buildout rests on credit markets that Morgan Stanley says are getting nervous.