Goldman and Apollo Seek Buyers for Pieces of SpaceX's $40 Billion GPU Financing

Some investors have been asked to commit up to $500 million each before formal syndication begins, according to the report. The debt includes an $8.3 billion senior secured loan led by Goldman and several bond tranches, with Apollo as the main bond investor and PIMCO also taking part.

The sell-down is a test of how much appetite credit investors still have for AI hardware debt. It began the day after Democrats won both houses of Congress, a result that has weighed on AI and data centre stocks as investors price in tougher scrutiny of the sector. Spreading the deal across more investors would cut how much of the risk sits with the arrangers.

SpaceX announced the deal on October 26, calling it the largest GPU financing ever. In its press release, the company said it had a binding commitment for an approximately $40 billion master finance lease for GPUs and related equipment, with an entity managed by Apollo as lessor. The equipment is the next generation of Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, for what SpaceX called its terrestrial compute build-out.

Goldman Sachs was sole structuring agent, and the financing group was led by Apollo and Goldman. Anchor commitments came from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and from capital accounts advised by KKR, SpaceX said. The company said it expected the lease to close before the end of 2026, subject to closing conditions, with lease schedules starting when the chips are delivered in the first half of 2027.

Under the structure described in Wednesday's reports, the financing and a $7 billion lease prepayment from SpaceX will fund the purchase of about $47.3 billion of Nvidia Rubin chips, which SpaceX will lease over five years.

In the October release, SpaceX's chief financial officer said the company "aims to deploy the largest compute infrastructure in the world" and was seeing "less than one year payback periods" on its AI infrastructure spending. SpaceX said the lease would diversify its funding and help bring more compute online for its Grok models and for cloud customers.

SpaceX is spending heavily. Its capital expenditure was nearly $20 billion in the third quarter, and it has said it expects $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter.

Neither the final terms nor the pricing of the portions being offered have been disclosed. SpaceX has said the full lease terms are set out in a Form 8-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.