SpaceX Needs $40 Billion To Buy Chips From Nvidia — Here's Why

One could argue that SpaceX has essentially replaced NASA as the leading space exploration organization in the United States. Today, SpaceX has launched over 700 rockets in total — a not insignificant number of which ended in explosions. In order to fuel these launches, the company requires a ton of resources, including chips that can power its AI infrastructure dreams.

Recently, news hit the internet that SpaceX is seeking $40 billion so it can purchase Nvidia chips. While most people associate Nvidia with graphics cards, the company is also heavily invested in AI development. After all, in September 2026, Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source community where AI developers can share their latest models and datasets. While current-gen Nvidia RTX graphics cards let gamers render the latest titles with gorgeous ray-traced visuals, they also grant computers AI capabilities. And that's why SpaceX wants Nvidia chips.

As you probably have guessed, SpaceX plans to build AI data centers with this mass purchase of Nvidia property, but these won't be your standard land-based ones powered by Tesla solar panels. Instead, these chips will be used for SpaceX's Starmind program — a chain of data centers that will orbit the Earth 1 million satellites strong. According to plans, each Starmind satellite will house Nvidia Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, which are designed from the ground up for AI data centers. No need to worry about SpaceX's purchase depleting Nvidia's stores of RTX 5070s and 5090s. Still, testing won't begin until 2027 at the earliest, so who knows when (or even if) Starmind will come to fruition.

As of writing this article, SpaceX is worth approximately $2.28 trillion. However, after people heard that the company planned on purchasing Nvidia AI chips, SpaceX stocks dropped 2%. It sounds like the company could foot the bill if push came to shove, but higher ups would rather accrue debt to buy these components.

According to reports, SpaceX plans to split the $40 billion purchase between two sources. The first $10 billion will be made out of bank loans, while the remaining $30 billion will come from "investment-grade debt" (i.e., selling bonds with low default risk to a large investor base). Apollo Global Management is expected to take on the majority of this debt and help find investors willing to purchase the rest of the bonds.

Earlier, when we said SpaceX was worth around $2.28 trillion, you may have assumed that meant the company had $2.28 trillion split up between savings and assets — but that couldn't be further from the truth. The company's revenue was only $7.81 billion in the second quarter (April 1 through June 30) compared to spendings of $18.37 billion, $15.83 billion of which were used for AI. Clearly SpaceX spends more than it makes at this point, so using external financing to buy the Nvidia chips makes a lot of sense.