SpaceX agrees roughly $40 billion lease with Apollo-managed entity to finance Nvidia AI chips

SpaceX said on Monday 26 October that it has reached a binding commitment to enter an approximately $40 billion master finance lease for graphics processing units (GPUs) and related equipment with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management.

Under the arrangement, described in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Apollo-managed entity will acquire GPU equipment and lease it to SpaceX for about five years, with SpaceX choosing the data centres where it is used. SpaceX said the lease will supply Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips for its ground-based computing build-out, and called it “the largest committed GPU financing”.

The financing is led by Apollo and Goldman Sachs, which acted as sole structuring agent, with anchor commitments from funds managed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and accounts advised by KKR, according to SpaceX. The company said the deal is expected to close before the end of 2026, subject to conditions, with lease schedules starting when the equipment is delivered in the first half of 2027.

In a statement, SpaceX’s chief financial officer said the company “aims to deploy the largest compute infrastructure in the world” and that the extra computing power would run its Grok AI services for businesses and consumers and serve cloud customers.

The filing came after SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said in a social media post on Sunday that the company had “closed $40B of debt for GPUs”, The Guardian reported.