SpaceX seeks to borrow $40 billion to buy Nvidia AI chips as AI financing race escalates

SpaceX is in talks to borrow a staggering $40 billion to buy Nvidia AI chips, putting Elon Musk’s company at the center of a growing Wall Street financing race to bankroll the enormous cost of AI computing infrastructure.

The proposed financing would include roughly $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Financial Times. Apollo Global Management is expected to lead the effort, with bond giant Pimco among the investment managers considering the deal. Discussions remain in the early stages and could still fall apart. If it moves forward, the transaction is expected to close in 2027.

“Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in talks with banks and investors to raise $40 billion of debt to buy chips from Nvidia, underscoring the insatiable demand among AI developers for more computing power,” Bloomberg reported.

The scale is extraordinary. A $40 billion borrowing package devoted to chips would rank among the largest debt financings yet tied to the AI buildout, turning a semiconductor purchase into something closer to an infrastructure megaproject.

SpaceX has become far more than a rocket manufacturer. Musk folded xAI into SpaceX earlier this year, bringing the company behind the Grok chatbot and Colossus supercomputing clusters under the same corporate umbrella. That combination has left SpaceX exposed to two of the most capital-intensive businesses on the planet: space infrastructure and frontier AI.

Musk said last month that xAI’s Colossus 2 data center could more than double its Nvidia chip count by December. He said the company plans to use Nvidia hardware exclusively for its data centers, making access to Nvidia’s processors central to its AI ambitions.

AI chip race is becoming a debt race

The proposed SpaceX financing points to a shift now spreading across the AI industry. Getting enough GPUs is no longer just a procurement problem. It is becoming a financing problem.

Morgan Stanley estimates AI infrastructure will require about $1.5 trillion in external financing by 2028, a figure that helps explain why asset managers, banks and private-credit firms are moving deeper into data centers, chips and related infrastructure.

Nvidia itself has been helping build the financial machinery around that spending. In August, the chipmaker partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR on financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure projects.

SpaceX would push that trend further.

The company went public in June through a record $86 billion IPO and later sold $25 billion of bonds. Its bonds have faced investor pressure amid concerns over heavy capital spending and limited financial disclosure, according to the Financial Times.

That makes the new talks a revealing test of Wall Street’s appetite. AI companies have spent the past several years racing to secure Nvidia GPUs. The next phase may be about who can secure tens of billions of dollars cheaply enough to keep buying them.

If SpaceX gets its $40 billion, the AI arms race will have produced something new: a financing arms race running right alongside the race for compute.