SpaceX is in talks to raise 40 billion dollars — about 10 billion in bank loans and 30 billion in investment-grade debt — to buy Nvidia AI chips, the Financial Times reported on October 6, 2026, with Reuters and Bloomberg confirming the outlines the following day. Apollo Global Management is expected to lead the financing and place the debt with institutional investors, with bond fund Pimco among a small group of lenders in talks. If completed, the deal would close in 2027 and would rank among the largest debt financings ever tied to the AI buildout.
The chips are earmarked for Starmind, SpaceX's planned orbital AI program: a proposed constellation of up to one million satellites, each carrying Nvidia Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, designed to run data-center-class AI workloads from low Earth orbit. No Starmind satellite has launched, and prototype testing is not scheduled to begin until early 2027 — which is what makes the financing unusual. It asks investment-grade bond markets to price a bet on satellites that do not yet exist, turning a semiconductor purchase into something closer to an infrastructure megaproject.
The discussions are in an early stage and could still fall apart, all sides stressed. But the backdrop explains why the deal is even possible. Musk took SpaceX public in June 2026 in a record 86 billion dollar IPO, then folded xAI into the company — leaving one corporate umbrella covering space infrastructure, frontier AI, and the Colossus supercomputing clusters. Musk said last month that xAI's Colossus 2 data center could more than double its Nvidia chip count by December, and that the company plans to use Nvidia hardware exclusively in its data centers.
The financing map is getting crowded. Nvidia in August partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on financing platforms intended to mobilize more than 500 billion dollars for AI infrastructure projects. Broadcom is reportedly gathering a 60 billion dollar AI chip financing syndicate that would benefit Anthropic and others. Morgan Stanley estimates AI infrastructure will need 1.5 trillion dollars in external financing by 2028.
Markets reacted cautiously: SpaceX shares slipped about 1 percent in postmarket trading while Nvidia ticked up. The deal is new money, not a refinancing, and a successful raise would push SpaceX's total debt past 79 billion dollars. For enterprise observers, the takeaway is structural: the AI boom's binding constraint is shifting from chip supply to the capital structures that can carry it, and investment-grade bond markets are now being asked to absorb computing bets at a scale previously reserved for sovereign infrastructure.