SpaceX wants to borrow $40 billion to buy chips from Nvidia. The Financial Times broke the story late Tuesday, and Bloomberg confirmed the talks with its own sources Wednesday morning, in what would rank among the biggest debt financings of the entire AI buildout.

The proposed structure is straightforward, if not modest: roughly $10 billion in bank loans plus $30 billion in investment-grade debt, all to pay for one enormous Nvidia chip order. Apollo Global Management is expected to lead the financing and place the debt with a broad group of investors, with bond giant Pimco among the lenders in discussions. The FT put the expected closing in 2027.

Here’s the number that stops you cold: $40 billion is essentially a full year of SpaceX revenue. FactSet pegs the company’s projected 2026 revenue at about $44.5 billion, per MarketWatch. Elon Musk’s rocket company is reportedly willing to borrow nearly its entire annual income to buy one supplier’s hardware.

That’s either insane or a fair reading of where the real bottleneck in AI sits right now. It isn’t rocket launches. It’s silicon.

What the SpaceX-Apollo deal would look like

The plan is still a plan. Bloomberg is explicit that the fundraising discussions are in an early stage and could end without a deal being completed. None of the principals is talking: SpaceX, Apollo, and Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, and Pimco declined.

But the shape is clear enough. Apollo would lead the financing and syndicate the debt out to a broad base of investors, in the now-familiar pattern of mega-scale AI infrastructure funding. The two-tranche structure, bank loans plus investment-grade bonds, suggests the deal is being sized for Wall Street’s most credit-hungry buyers, not for speculative private credit alone.

Markets reacted the way markets do when Musk shows up with a shopping list. SpaceX shares slipped about 1.2% in postmarket trading to $169.79, per Bloomberg, and slid further in the premarket Wednesday. Nvidia’s stock ticked up fractionally, continuing a run that has the chipmaker closing in on a $6 trillion market valuation.

Why SpaceX needs the chips that badly

SpaceX stopped being just a rocket company some time ago. After absorbing Musk’s xAI, the company runs the Grok AI model through its Colossus data centers, and it rents Colossus compute out to other AI developers, including Anthropic and Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Musk hasn’t been shy about the expansion schedule. Last month he said Colossus 2 could more than double its Nvidia chip count by December. In a post on X, he detailed the current hardware: 110,000 Nvidia GB200 chips and 440,000 GB300 chips, with another 220,000 GB300s expected operational within weeks, 220,000 more in November, and 220,000 more in December “if we get lucky.” He’s also said SpaceX will use Nvidia hardware exclusively in its data centers.

That appetite explains why $40 billion doesn’t sound like enough even now. When your stated plan is to grow from roughly half a million top-tier GPUs toward 1.44 million by year-end, a $40 billion order is just the next installment. It’s also why Apollo sees a borrower worth lending to: SpaceX’s AI business, which Barron’s notes is expected to generate $60 billion in 2027 revenue (up from a $38 billion estimate in July), with Wall Street projecting $530 billion in AI-related revenue by 2031.

Nvidia keeps winning the AI economy

Step back and the pattern is hard to miss. This is the third blockbuster AI-financing story in a week, and Nvidia sits at the center of all of them. In August, the chipmaker partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on financing platforms meant to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. Days ago, Bloomberg reported a Broadcom-led Wall Street syndicate is gathering $60 billion in AI chip financing that would benefit Anthropic. Now SpaceX is asking Apollo to fund a $40 billion Nvidia order.

Morgan Stanley’s estimate gives the frenzy a number: AI infrastructure will need $1.5 trillion in external financing by 2028. Lenders and investors are growing more cautious about funding that expansion, which is exactly why Apollo’s willingness to lead a deal this size matters.

Why this matters

Borrowing a year’s revenue for one chip order is the clearest signal yet that compute, not capital, is the constraint Musk is optimizing against. Wall Street has spent the year debating whether AI valuations are a bubble; Musk is behaving like the chips are the scarce asset and everything else is just paper.

The skeptic’s version is worth stating too. Debt this size makes SpaceX’s AI business a leveraged bet on Nvidia supply, Grok demand, and customers who are currently renting capacity, not buying it outright. If talks collapse, it tells you the lenders’ caution Morgan Stanley warned about is already here. If the deal closes in 2027 as reported, it tells you something else: that the AI boom’s real winners aren’t the model labs at all. They’re the company selling the picks.

Frequently asked questions

What is SpaceX’s $40 billion Nvidia deal? SpaceX is in talks to raise $40 billion in debt to buy Nvidia AI chips, the Financial Times first reported on Oct. 6, 2026, with Bloomberg confirming the talks. Apollo Global Management would lead the financing: about $10 billion in bank loans plus $30 billion in investment-grade debt, with the transaction expected to close in 2027.

Why does SpaceX need so many Nvidia chips? The chips feed SpaceX’s AI computing business, which includes the Colossus data centers it inherited from xAI. Musk said last month that Colossus 2 could more than double its Nvidia chip count by December, and that SpaceX will use Nvidia hardware exclusively in its facilities.

How big is $40 billion next to SpaceX’s actual revenue? Huge. The $40 billion raise would be roughly equal to all of SpaceX’s projected 2026 revenue, estimated by FactSet at about $44.5 billion, per MarketWatch.

Is the deal certain to happen? No. Bloomberg reports the fundraising talks are in an early stage and could end without a deal. SpaceX, Apollo, and Nvidia have not commented, and Pimco, a reported lender, declined to comment.

Sources: Financial Times (reported via Reuters), Bloomberg, Reuters, Barron’s, MarketWatch