SpaceX $40B NVIDIA Chip Lease: Goldman, Apollo Seek Buyers

Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global Management are seeking outside investors to take pieces of the roughly $40 billion SpaceX chip lease financing, with some buyers offered stakes of up to $500 million each, Bloomberg News reported on Nov. 4, in a report Reuters also carried.

The two firms are approaching investors before formal syndication begins, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the discussions. According to that report, the package includes an $8.3 billion senior secured loan led by Goldman for bank syndication and several bond tranches, with Apollo a principal bond investor and Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) also taking part. Together with a $7 billion lease prepayment, it supports about $47.3 billion of Nvidia Rubin-generation equipment due for delivery in the first half of 2027, Bloomberg said.

The sell-down follows SpaceX's Oct. 26 announcement, which Voltgrid covered on Oct. 25 when Musk said the $40 billion GPU financing was done. The company's filings show a commitment, not a closed deal. In its Form 8-K, SpaceX said it signed a binding commitment letter on Oct. 24 to enter a master finance lease, and that the lease is expected to close before year-end, subject to closing conditions.

How the SpaceX Chip Lease Is Structured

SpaceX does not buy the chips. Under the 8-K, an entity managed by Apollo acquires GPU pods and related equipment and leases them to SpaceX for data centers it selects. The equipment arrives in tranches, each with its own lease schedule of about five to five and one-quarter years. Rent is paid quarterly in advance: one-twentieth of the tranche's financed cost plus a fixed annual rate on the outstanding balance, a rate that is set at pricing before the lease is signed. SpaceX expects principal payments over the schedules to total about $40 billion.

Apollo's Oct. 26 release names the chips as NVIDIA Vera Rubin parts for SpaceX's terrestrial compute buildout. It says financing parties led by Apollo and Goldman Sachs, the sole structuring agent, committed to the deal, with anchor commitments from funds managed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and accounts advised by KKR. The new Bloomberg report describes the next step: placing slices of those commitments with a wider set of investors.

Bloomberg also reported two terms that matter to buyers, citing documents it reviewed. SpaceX must keep paying rent regardless of equipment condition, casualty or force majeure. And SpaceX gives no residual value guarantee, so investors carry the risk of what used AI chips are worth when the leases end.

Why the Sell-Down Matters for AI Chip Supply

The deal turns one of the largest GPU orders on record into a five-year credit product tied to one tenant and one chip generation. How quickly Goldman and Apollo place it is a test of how much appetite investors have for financing AI hardware at this scale. Apollo's release says the chips will help power Grok and SpaceX's cloud services. SpaceX called it the largest committed GPU financing, ahead of a $36 billion structured notes deal for GPUs leased to Anthropic, as Yahoo Finance reported.

What Is Not Confirmed Yet

No company statement on the syndication appears in the reports we read, and the Bloomberg account rests on unnamed sources. The fixed lease rate, the number of buyers and the final tranche sizes have not been disclosed. The $40 billion figure is the expected lease principal, while the $47.3 billion equipment figure includes the $7 billion prepayment. Closing is still expected before the end of 2026, and lease schedules begin when the GPUs are delivered in the first half of 2027.