SpaceX Secures $40B for Nvidia Chips. Here’s Who’s Paying for Its AI Buildout.
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| By Chris Graebe |
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, filed its S-1 with the SEC on Monday.
That’s the paperwork a company must file before it sells stock to the public.
It’s also where the real numbers come out: how much the company makes, how much it spends and what could go wrong.
This one shows about $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up roughly 12x from a year earlier.
Our IPO team is going through the filing line by line right now.
My Day One Syndicate co-editor Sean Levine is already on the case.
He said,
It's about time they're finally pulling the trigger. Anthropic should be trying to raise as much as they can. With sentiment against data centers continuing to rise and a choppy market hinting at rising risk of a correction, the longer they wait, the harder the argument for a $2T valuation becomes. There has been 'no time like the present' for at least a few months now.
We’ll run the data through our proprietary Weiss IPO Scores model and let you know what we find.
The investor roadshow could start as soon as Nov. 9, with shares trading as early as mid-November.
But Anthropic isn’t the only big IPO story of 2026.
The Year’s Other Big IPO Also Made News Today
SpaceX (SPCX) raised $86 billion at its IPO in June. Then it went back to the debt markets for another $25 billion.
On Monday, it announced a $40 billion GPU financing arrangement involving an Apollo Global (APO)-managed entity.
Goldman Sachs (GS) is the structuring agent. BlackRock (BLK), Goldman Sachs Asset Management and KKR & Co. (KKR)-advised accounts made anchor commitments.
That $40 billion number should stop you cold. Why?
Because if you’ve been following our recent coverage of circular financing in AI, this deal shows every sign that SpaceX is doing just that … and then some.and then some.
What SpaceX Is Actually Doing
The deal is expected to close before year-end, with chip deliveries set for the first half of 2027.
The financing would pay for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips. Musk has confirmed SpaceX will use only Nvidia hardware for its data center buildout.
The company ended the second quarter with 1.4 gigawatts of compute capacity.
Musk says it could reach more than 2 gigawatts by year-end, and potentially 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
SpaceX is planning to rival the largest cloud operators on the planet in roughly 12 months.
Nvidia estimates the cost of deploying its chips runs about $60 billion per gigawatt.
Going from 2 to 10 gigawatts would imply an additional 8 gigawatts of capacity. At an illustrative cost of $60 billion per gigawatt, that would amount to $480 billion in estimated infrastructure costs.
This means that $40 billion is merely a down payment.
Related story: The Real Cost of AI’s Replacement Cycle
Morgan Stanley (MS) analyst Adam Jonas has written that SpaceX will require an average of $84 billion in external capital per year through 2034 before it produces positive cash flow.
The Circular Financing Problem Gets Bigger
And then it gets more complicated …
Adding $40 billion more to SpaceX’s $65 billion in debt on its balance sheet would push the total to nearly $105 billion.
That’s more than its current annual revenue run rate. It’s also more than SpaceX’s entire existing debt principal just three months ago.
Now layer in the relationships.
Nvidia holds approximately $21 billion in SpaceX stock through its investment in xAI.
Apollo, which is leading the SpaceX financing, is also one of the six financial firms Nvidia tapped in August for its $500 billion AI infrastructure partnership.
And the private credit firm has already struck separate deals with Musk’s companies including a $7 billion financing for xAI’s Nvidia clusters.
So, to break it down:
- The company selling the chips also holds equity in the company buying them.
- The firm arranging the debt financing is also a strategic partner of the chip seller.
- And the buyer is taking on debt that exceeds its existing balance just to place one chip order.
This is exactly what we described in our piece on circular financing.
The same names …
Moving money in a circle …
With the chips themselves serving as both the asset being purchased …
And, in many similar deals, the collateral backing the loans.
The Space Data Center Wildcard
There’s a dimension to this story that goes beyond the terrestrial data center buildout.
Musk has confirmed that some of the Nvidia chips being purchased will head into orbit.
SpaceX’s Starmind program envisions a network of satellites housing Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs. These would be data centers in space, processing AI workloads in orbit.
Below is the company’s rendering of one of those satellites in orbit:
Musk is both figuratively and literally entering new territory. Deployment will test whether Nvidia’s latest processors can handle orbital conditions like radiation, temperature extremes, and vacuum or whether the chips need significant modifications for space-based use.
As an extraordinary technical ambition, it is also a significant capital risk. This is risk, layered on top of an already capital-intensive terrestrial buildout. It is also funded by debt that assumes demand for AI compute will continue to grow at the pace the industry is betting on.
The Question Investors Need to Ask
SpaceX generated $12.5 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, while capital expenditures hit $28.5 billion, the vast majority directed toward AI infrastructure. The company is spending more than twice what it earns, and the gap is widening as the buildout accelerates.
The bull case is that SpaceX is uniquely positioned to serve the overflow demand from hyperscalers, charging premium prices that few competitors can match.
With data center capacity still in short supply, SpaceX has the pricing power that justifies the aggressive spending.
The bear case is that the company is front-loading hundreds of billions in capital commitments on the assumption that those premium prices hold.
Even as Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT) and Alphabet (GOOGL) also bring enormous new capacity online.
SpaceX’s contract policy allows either party to cancel with just 90 days’ notice. This creates significant exposure for the company.
The stock is already down more than 8% from its IPO price. And it is currently trading around $146, which is around 35% off the all-time high of $225 it reached just days after going public.
This is not a company that looks cheap. But it is a company that is betting very aggressively that the AI compute boom continues exactly as projected.
And then there’s the bigger picture that SpaceX’s balance sheet alone doesn’t capture …
The $40 billion debt raise and the circular deals between companies that are simultaneously each other’s chip suppliers, investors and lenders.
None of it flows through the traditional banking system in ways that let anyone see the full exposure.
Debt this large … this tangled … and this hidden from view doesn’t give much warning before it causes problems.
The only real question is whether you’re prepared when it does.
Dr. Martin Weiss and safe-money expert Nilus Mattive have been working to map all of this out, and what they’ve found points to something more serious than a repeat of the dot-com crash.
The good news is, they've laid out exactly what to do before the weight of all this debt starts to show.
Their full findings, and your next steps, are right here.
The web of deals holding this together is intact … for now. Position yourself before all of that changes.
Happy hunting!
Chris Graebe
