SpaceX lines up a $40 billion GPU lease with Apollo

SpaceX has a binding commitment for about $40 billion in lease financing for AI chips. In a Form 8-K filed Monday, the company says it signed a commitment letter on Oct. 24 with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management. That entity will buy graphics processing unit pods and related equipment and lease them to SpaceX for use at data centers SpaceX chooses. SpaceX expects total principal payments over the life of the leases to come to roughly $40 billion.

The SpaceX announcement says the lease will deliver NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin chips for its terrestrial compute buildout and calls it the largest committed GPU financing to date. Apollo and Goldman Sachs lead the group of financing parties, with Goldman as sole structuring agent, and funds managed by BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and accounts advised by KKR made anchor commitments. Apollo published the same release. CFO Bret Johnsen said SpaceX is seeing payback periods of less than one year on its AI infrastructure and that the lease addresses a notable portion of the funding its growth plans require, to bring more compute online for Grok and for cloud customers.

The filing lays out how the money works. Equipment arrives in tranches, and each tranche gets its own lease schedule of about five to five and a quarter years. Rent is paid quarterly in advance and covers one-twentieth of the tranche's financed cost each quarter, plus interest at a fixed rate that will be set at pricing, plus some ongoing costs. The deal still has closing conditions. SpaceX expects it to close before year end, with leases starting in the first half of 2027 as the GPUs are delivered.

Elon said on X on Sunday that the financing was mainly for chips arriving in the first and second quarters and would not be a major factor this quarter, Reuters reported. The deal follows a third quarter in which SpaceX's AI segment, which includes Grok and its cloud compute business, brought in $7.6 billion of $14.6 billion in revenue, according to TechCrunch. Capital spending reached nearly $20 billion in the quarter, and Johnsen has guided to $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter.

Key facts

• SpaceX signed a binding commitment letter on Oct. 24 for a master finance lease with an Apollo-managed lessor (SpaceX 8-K).
• Expected total principal payments are about $40 billion, with each lease running about five to five and a quarter years (SpaceX 8-K).
• The equipment is NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs and related hardware for SpaceX's ground data centers (SpaceX).
• Apollo and Goldman Sachs lead the financing; BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and KKR-advised accounts are anchors (Apollo).
• Closing is expected before the end of 2026, with leases starting in the first half of 2027 (Reuters).

How to read it

This is a lease, not a loan or a stock sale. SpaceX gets the chips without paying for them up front and pays them off over about five years, which spreads the cost of its compute buildout over the period the hardware is in use. The commitment is binding, but the master lease is not signed yet, and the interest rate has not been set.

Independence

Beam42 wrote this note from the SpaceX Form 8-K and the SpaceX and Apollo announcements, with independent reporting from Reuters and TechCrunch. It is not a company release.