SpaceX has announced an agreement with investment firm Apollo Global Management. Apollo will buy graphics processing units (GPUs - chips that accelerate computing for neural networks) and lease them to SpaceX. The deal has not yet closed, but the parties value it at about $40 bln excluding interest and fees. The term is about five years. SpaceX disclosed this in a document for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC - the American stock market regulator).
The chips in question are Nvidia Vera Rubin. Nvidia began producing them in the second half of this year. Apollo will hand over the processors gradually, starting in the first half of 2027.
Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed by xAI, which joined SpaceX in February. In two years it has built two large data centers in Memphis, Tennessee - Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. Together they hold several hundred thousand GPUs. Such infrastructure, that is, data centers and the chips running in them, is needed to create and launch large AI models.
Apollo has already taken part in financing Musk's AI projects. In January it led a $3.5 bln financing package. That money allowed the investment fund to buy Nvidia chips and lease them to xAI for Colossus 2.
SpaceX also leases computing capacity to the creator of the Claude chatbot, Anthropic, and to Google. These deals have become an important source of revenue for SpaceX. The company is now expanding Colossus 2. According to Musk, by the end of the year the computing capacity of this center should more than double compared with the end of September.
Musk wrote about the deal in advance on social network X. In his view, debt financing markets have "almost completely closed off access to money for companies that do not have substantial revenue outside AI data centers." He presented the GPU lease agreement as evidence of investors' confidence in SpaceX - unlike newcomers to the cloud market, the so-called "neoclouds" such as CoreWeave or Nebius.
"More than 200 neoclouds await death at the guppy level and consolidation," Musk wrote. "Some will survive, but few."
It is worth noting: these are the businessman's statements about the market, not the conclusions of an independent study.