Apollo and Banks in Talks to Finance SpaceX's $40 Billion Nvidia GPU Purchase

Apollo Capital Management and a consortium of banks are in preliminary discussions with SpaceX to help fund a $40 billion purchase of Nvidia graphics processing units, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named to discuss the talks.

The deal would primarily rely on the investment-grade debt market — the same channel SpaceX tapped four months ago, shortly after its record-breaking IPO in mid-June, when the company raised $25 billion in bonds across multiple durations.

SpaceX's $40 billion debt arrangement would likely use the GPUs themselves as collateral, with Apollo Capital playing a leading role in structuring the financing, the person said. Apollo declined to comment. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Financial Times was first to report on the financing discussions.

Talks remain at an early stage, and key details — including which lenders will ultimately participate — have not been finalized, the person said.

The proposed transaction reflects a broader pattern of large technology companies turning to debt markets to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure. Meta, Amazon, and Google have each issued bonds in recent months as the cost of building out AI capacity has climbed.

The rationale for using GPUs as collateral rests on prevailing credit-market assumptions about the hardware's longevity. The market currently operates under the expectation that GPUs hold their value for approximately seven years, according to a person in the credit industry who also requested anonymity.

Computing capacity remains scarce, and the shortage is not expected to ease in the near term, a dynamic that supports the collateral thesis, that person added.

Even so, the financing environment has shifted since SpaceX's June bond sale. AI-related bonds have sold off since then, and credit spreads have widened. Two fixed-income sources told CNBC that investors are now demanding higher yields to service AI-related debt, a sign that fixed-income participants are becoming more selective about their exposure to the sector.

The scale of the proposed SpaceX transaction comes as one prominent technology analyst argues the AI buildout is still in its early phases. Dan Ives, a partner at Yorkville Ives, initiated coverage on nearly 50 technology companies Tuesday, describing his outlook as "very bullish" and arguing that investors are "still underestimating the scale and scope of this $4 trillion dollar spending wave over the next few years despite AI safety concerns, regulatory calls from the Beltway, and geopolitical jitters."

Ives placed Nvidia among his top five equity picks, assigning it a price target of $300 — implying roughly 25% upside from Tuesday's close — citing broadening demand beyond the largest cloud providers toward sovereign AI programs, neoclouds, and enterprise customers.

That broadening demand for Nvidia hardware is directly visible in the SpaceX talks, which signal that companies outside the traditional hyperscaler tier are now seeking to acquire GPU capacity at a scale that requires structured credit financing to execute.

Whether the deal closes — and at what terms — will depend in part on how credit markets absorb the ongoing widening of spreads in the AI segment, reinforcing that the path from committed AI spending to actual deployed infrastructure remains contingent on financing conditions that are still in flux.

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