SpaceX closes $40B borrowing deal to buy Nvidia GPUs
SpaceX raised about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in bonds, led by Apollo Global Management, citing its investment-grade rating and Starlink cash flow.
SpaceX closed a $40 billion borrowing deal to buy GPUs, according to tech42.co.kr. The package consisted of roughly $10 billion in bank loans and about $30 billion in investment-grade bonds, with Apollo Global Management leading the financing and global investment banks participating.
CEO Elon Musk cited SpaceX's investment-grade rating and cash flow from Starlink and launch operations as the basis for the raise. The company holds a BBB rating from S&P and a Baa1 from Moody's. The debt carries callable terms, mainly for GPU payments arriving in the first and second quarters of next year, and using the Nvidia GPUs bought with the borrowed money as collateral was considered.
SpaceX reported third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion, up 161% year on year. The AI segment reached $7.56 billion, more than ninefold growth, overtaking Starlink for the first time. Capital expenditure was $19.6 billion in the quarter, of which $16.4 billion went to AI, and CFO Bret Johnsen guided fourth-quarter capex at $35–40 billion.
Musk said 780,000 Nvidia chips are running at Colossus in Memphis — 230,000 at Colossus and 550,000 at Colossus 2 — to be raised to 1.21 million by year-end. Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI rent this compute. Musk named power and cooling, not chips, as the bottleneck, and said most of the 200-plus neoclouds will be culled and consolidated.
Terafab and a possible Tesla merger
Terafab, the SpaceX-Tesla semiconductor joint venture, aims to make its first SRAM-based test chips in Austin in May–June 2027 and reach mass production in the third quarter of 2028. Total investment could reach $119 billion at later stages. Musk also said a special committee of independent directors is discussing a Tesla merger and that terms have not been agreed.
In October 2025, CoreWeave's five-year CDS spread hit an intraday record of 1194.5bp, a level Bloomberg calculated implies more than a 60% probability of default within five years. Musk posted the single word "Yikes" on X in response to a post by venture investor Chamath Palihapitiya about CoreWeave's bond yields.
Quick answers
How is SpaceX's $40 billion borrowing deal structured?
It consists of roughly $10 billion in bank loans and about $30 billion in investment-grade bonds, led by Apollo Global Management.
What are SpaceX's credit ratings?
SpaceX holds a BBB rating from S&P and a Baa1 rating from Moody's.
When will Terafab produce its first chips?
The SpaceX-Tesla joint venture aims to make its first SRAM-based test chips in Austin in May–June 2027, with mass production targeted for the third quarter of 2028.