Photo: Jenny Hautmann, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Image resized.
SpaceX said Monday it has secured a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease to finance Nvidia chips and related equipment, which the company called the largest committed GPU financing ever.
In its release, SpaceX said the master finance lease is with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management and will pay for Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips for the company’s computing buildout on the ground. A GPU is the type of processor used to train and run artificial-intelligence models. In a finance lease, the company gets the equipment and pays for it over time instead of buying it outright, so the cost is spread across years.
Who is providing the money
The financing was committed to by several parties led by Apollo and Goldman Sachs, which served as sole structuring agent. Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, along with capital accounts advised by KKR, made anchor commitments, meaning they agreed to take large shares early.
Timing and conditions
Entering the lease is still subject to specified closing conditions, and SpaceX expects it to close before the end of 2026. Lease schedules are expected to begin as the chips and equipment are delivered, in the first half of 2027. Fuller terms are due in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX said.
SpaceX’s chief financial officer said the company aims to deploy “the largest compute infrastructure in the world” and said it sees payback periods of less than one year on its investments in what it calls superintelligence infrastructure. The lease, he said, diversifies SpaceX’s funding sources and covers a notable portion of the money needed for its growth plans, including compute to power its Grok chatbot for businesses and consumers and to serve current and future cloud customers. SpaceX’s payback claim is its own and was not independently verified.
The deal is part of a wave of financing tied to AI data centers, where chips are costly and are often paid for through leases and debt rather than cash, and where lenders such as Apollo and KKR have become major sources of capital.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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