SpaceX said on Monday, October 26, that an affiliate of Apollo Global Management will buy AI chips and server hardware and lease them to the company, in a deal worth about $40 billion in total principal payments. According to Reuters, each lease will run a little over five years from the day the equipment arrives, with the deal expected to be finalised by the end of the year and leases starting in the first half of 2027. Chief executive Elon Musk said on Sunday on X that SpaceX had “closed” the $40 billion debt financing for graphics processing units. The deal underlines how heavily SpaceX is spending to secure computing power for its AI ambitions.
What The Deal Covers
Under the arrangement, the Apollo-managed entity buys the hardware and leases it to SpaceX, rather than SpaceX buying the equipment outright. Reuters reports the hardware covers AI chips and server hardware, with total principal payments of about $40 billion across the leases. The structure matters because it separates ownership from use: Apollo’s affiliate holds the assets, while SpaceX gets the computing capacity it needs to run its workloads.
The lease term is tied to delivery, not to the signing date. According to a regulatory filing cited by Reuters, each lease will run a little over five years from the day the equipment arrives. That gives SpaceX a multi-year window on each batch of hardware, while the financing behind the purchase sits with the Apollo vehicle rather than on SpaceX’s own balance sheet in the same way a purchase would.
The Timeline And The Money
SpaceX aims to finalise the deal by the end of 2026. The leases themselves are expected to start in the first half of 2027, once the chips are delivered, which puts the first leased capacity into service months after the agreement closes. Musk’s Sunday post on X framed the financing as closed, and said it mainly targets chips arriving in the first and second quarters.
The $40 billion figure sits alongside an already large spending plan. Chief financial officer Bret Johnsen has said SpaceX still expects fourth-quarter capital expenditure of $35 billion to $40 billion, a range the company has already guided to publicly. The Apollo leases therefore add a separate, longer-dated financing layer on top of that quarterly spending, rather than replacing it.
Why It Matters
SpaceX is not the only AI company financing hardware this way. On the same day, banks lined up $63 billion to finance Broadcom chips for Anthropic, in a deal where a special purpose vehicle buys the equipment and leases it to the Claude maker. The SpaceX arrangement follows the same pattern: lenders and asset managers fund the purchase, and the AI company takes the capacity on lease. For the wider industry, leased AI hardware is becoming a standard route to capacity, alongside direct purchases and equity investment, as in NVIDIA’s $3 billion investment in Meta’s AI build-out.
For SpaceX itself, the deal connects directly to its AI ambitions. SpaceX’s AI business became its largest segment in the third quarter, and Reuters frames the new spending as an effort to capitalise on surging demand for computing power that also helps bankroll its Moon and Mars ambitions. Securing $40 billion of leased hardware gives that business a defined pipeline of capacity into 2027 and beyond, without waiting for each purchase to be funded quarter by quarter.
Background
SpaceX built its name on reusable rockets and the Starlink satellite network, then absorbed Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI and its Grok models, bringing the lab and its data centres under one roof. Reuters reported earlier in October that SpaceX was in talks with banks and asset managers to raise $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips, and the Apollo deal is the closed form of that financing effort, moving from negotiation to a signed leasing structure with deliveries expected in the first half of 2027.
Source: Reuters: SpaceX Apollo financing
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