SpaceX has reached a binding commitment to enter a master finance lease worth about $40 billion in principal payments with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management. The company announced it on Monday, October 26, and disclosed the terms in a Form 8-K filed with the SEC. SpaceX calls it the largest committed GPU financing to date.
How the deal works
Instead of SpaceX borrowing money to buy chips outright, the Apollo-managed lessor will buy GPU pods and related equipment and lease them to SpaceX for data centers SpaceX picks. According to the filing:
- Equipment arrives in tranches, and each tranche gets its own lease schedule lasting about five to five and a quarter years.
- Rent is paid quarterly in advance and is generally one-twentieth of the tranche’s financed cost, plus interest at a fixed annual rate on the outstanding balance and some ongoing costs. The rate will be set at pricing, before the master lease is signed.
- The commitment letter was signed on October 24. The lease is expected to close before the end of 2026, subject to closing conditions, with lease schedules starting in the first half of 2027 as GPUs are delivered.
SpaceX says the hardware will be NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips for its terrestrial compute buildout. Apollo and Goldman Sachs lead the financing group, with Goldman as sole structuring agent, and funds managed by BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and accounts advised by KKR made anchor commitments.
Why it matters
CFO Bret Johnsen said SpaceX is seeing “less than one year payback periods” on its AI infrastructure and that the lease diversifies its funding as it adds compute to power Grok and cloud customers. Reuters notes that Elon Musk said on X on Sunday that the money mainly covers chips arriving in the first and second quarters of next year and won’t be a major factor this quarter, while SpaceX still expects fourth-quarter capital spending of $35 billion to $40 billion.
The deal follows reports last week that the financing was pricing at higher rates as AI credit markets cooled. The filing itself doesn’t give a rate yet.
Sources: SpaceX investor relations, SpaceX Form 8-K on SEC.gov and Reuters via Investing.com.