SpaceX Apollo GPU lease: $40 billion for Nvidia Vera Rubin chips

Key takeaways

• The SpaceX Apollo deal is a lease, not a bond sale: an Apollo-managed entity buys the hardware and SpaceX rents it for roughly five to five-and-a-quarter years per tranche.
• SpaceX calls it the largest committed GPU financing; Apollo and Goldman Sachs lead it, with anchor commitments from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and KKR-advised accounts.
• Closing is expected before the end of 2026, and leases start as Nvidia Vera Rubin equipment is delivered in the first half of 2027.
• Bloomberg reported early on October 27 (UTC) that Pimco took a $4 billion slice of the package, citing people familiar with the matter.

What happened in the SpaceX Apollo $40 billion GPU deal

The SpaceX Apollo GPU lease is worth approximately $40 billion: SpaceX signed a binding commitment with an Apollo Global Management entity that will buy Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs and lease them to SpaceX, the company announced on October 26, 2026.

In a release on its investor relations site on Monday, October 26, SpaceX said it had reached a binding commitment to enter the roughly $40 billion lease for GPUs and related equipment. The chips are Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin parts, earmarked for what SpaceX called its "terrestrial compute buildout." Further terms were set out in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the same day.

According to the release, Apollo and Goldman Sachs led the financing alongside other parties, and Goldman Sachs acted as sole structuring agent. Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, plus capital accounts advised by KKR, made anchor commitments.

TechCrunch, reporting at about 16:46 UTC on October 26, said the Apollo entity will buy the chips and server hardware and lease them back, with each lease running about five to five-and-a-quarter years from delivery. PitchBook, in a report republished by Yahoo Finance at about 16:19 UTC, said purchases will happen in tranches and compared the deal with a $36 billion structured-notes deal arranged earlier this year to buy and lease GPUs for Anthropic.

At 00:10 UTC on October 27, Bloomberg reported that Pimco bought a $4 billion piece of the financing, citing people familiar with the matter. SpaceX's release does not name Pimco, and neither company had publicly confirmed the figure at the time of writing.

Deal terms at a glance

What we know and what we don't know yet

The size, structure, lead parties, chip type and timetable come from SpaceX itself. SpaceX's chief financial officer said in the release that the lease diversifies the company's funding sources and helps bring compute online for its Grok chatbot and cloud customers. The CFO, named by TechCrunch as Bret Johnsen, also cited "less than one year payback periods" on these investments; the release gave no calculation to support that figure.

Not yet public: how many GPUs the lease covers, where they will be installed, how much power they need, and the full list of lenders and their shares. Converge Digest noted that SpaceX did not disclose GPU counts, data center locations or power requirements. The Pimco allocation rests on Bloomberg's sources only.

Background: from debt talk to a signed lease

The deal ends weeks of reports. On October 6–7, the Financial Times, followed by Reuters, said SpaceX was seeking about $40 billion in an Apollo-led package of roughly $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, with Pimco among lenders in talks. On October 25, Elon Musk said SpaceX had raised $40 billion in debt for GPUs, as we covered in SpaceX's $40 billion debt raise for GPUs. The signed version is a lease rather than a straight bond issue.

The spending behind it is large. SpaceX's AI segment brought in $7.6 billion of its $14.6 billion third-quarter revenue, more than Starlink and launches combined, according to TechCrunch (see how SpaceX AI revenue overtook Starlink). Capital spending rose to nearly $20 billion in the quarter from $6.9 billion a year earlier, and Johnsen said on the October 20 earnings call that he expects $35–40 billion in the fourth quarter alone. SpaceX's Form 10-Q showed $38.84 billion of debt and finance leases at September 30, 2026.

What it means

Leasing lets SpaceX add chips without putting the full purchase price on its own balance sheet up front, and it gives private credit firms such as Apollo a large, asset-backed loan tied to a borrower with Starlink and launch cash flow. Musk argued on X that this cash flow sets SpaceX apart from the more than 200 "neocloud" firms that depend only on renting AI capacity, TechCrunch reported. For readers following how GPU buildouts are paid for, see our explainers on what a neocloud is and CoreWeave's debt and bonds, and our coverage of Apollo's view on the AI payoff.

The next checkpoints are the deal's closing before year-end, any confirmation of lender allocations, and SpaceX's fourth-quarter results, which should show how much of the planned spending has started.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.