SpaceX Arranges $40 Billion Apollo Lease for AI Hardware
SpaceX has secured a binding commitment for roughly $40 billion in financing for AI chips and related data-centre equipment through an entity managed by Apollo Global Management. The company described the transaction as the largest committed GPU financing deal, with Apollo buying the hardware and leasing it to SpaceX.
The leases are expected to run for about five to five-and-a-quarter years from the delivery of each equipment tranche. SpaceX expects the transaction to close by year-end, subject to closing conditions, while leases are scheduled to begin in the first half of 2027 as GPUs and associated systems arrive.
Lease structure funds a terrestrial compute buildout
Apollo said the financing will support delivery of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips for SpaceX’s terrestrial compute buildout. The arrangement covers both the GPUs and related server hardware, rather than a conventional borrowing facility in which SpaceX would acquire the equipment directly.
Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said the lease diversifies SpaceX’s funding sources and addresses a notable portion of the financing needed for its growth plans. He said the company is seeing payback periods of less than one year on AI infrastructure investments as it scales compute for Grok and its cloud services.
The funding plan follows a period in which questions surrounding SpaceX’s AI direction have persisted, including reports of a SpaceX sale attempt and the company’s position in the expanding market for AI compute.
AI revenue and spending rise sharply
SpaceX said its AI segment, comprising the Grok chatbot, the Cursor coding tool and its cloud-compute business, generated $7.6 billion of the company’s $14.6 billion in third-quarter revenue. That amount exceeded revenue from Starlink and rocket launches combined.
Capital expenditures reached nearly $20 billion, compared with $6.9 billion a year earlier, as SpaceX expanded its compute footprint. On the October 20 earnings call, Johnsen said the company expected fourth-quarter spending of $35 billion to $40 billion.
Financing arrives amid pressure on compute providers
The commitment comes as debt-market investors scrutinise high capital expenditure and limited profitability among AI infrastructure companies. Elon Musk argued that companies reliant solely on AI data-centre revenue face a more difficult financing environment than businesses with other significant revenue streams.
For businesses building AI capacity, the deal illustrates how long-term equipment leases can align hardware payments with staged deliveries, but it also makes the timing of demand, infrastructure deployment and lease commitments central to capital planning.