SpaceX gets $40 billion from Apollo to finance its Vera Rubin GPU

The Apollo fund will buy Nvidia chips and servers to rent them to SpaceX for just over five years, while AI now weighs more than half of the Group's turnover.

SpaceX has secured a firm commitment of about $40 billion from Apollo Global Management to equip its terrestrial data centers. The arrangement is based on leasing: the New York fund acquires the hardware, Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPUs and the associated servers, then leases it to SpaceX for a period of 5 to 5.25 years. The first leases will start in the first half of 2027, at the rate of deliveries, and the closing of the operation is expected by the end of the year.

AI ahead of Starlink

The machines will be used for Grok, the Cursor code tool and the group's cloud computing offerings, on which SpaceX says it is aiming for a return on investment in less than a year. In the third quarter, the AI business generated $7.6 billion on $14.6 billion in revenue, more than Starlink and launches combined. Capital expenditures approached $20 billion over the period and could reach $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth quarter.

Elon Musk took the opportunity to predict a consolidation of the "neoclouds": according to him, more than 200 of these specialized computing power rental companies lack non-AI revenues to get through a hardening of the debt markets.