SpaceX secures a $40 billion GPU lease commitment from Apollo for NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips to power Grok
SpaceX has signed a binding commitment to enter into a master finance lease worth approximately $40 billion for graphics processing units and related equipment, with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management acting as lessor. The company announced the agreement on October 26, 2026, describing it as the largest committed GPU financing to date, and disclosed the terms the same day in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to SpaceX, the lease will deliver next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips for its terrestrial compute buildout, and the additional capacity is intended to power Grok for enterprise and consumer users as well as existing and future cloud services customers.
The transaction is structured as a lease rather than a purchase. The Apollo-managed entity will acquire GPU pods and related equipment and lease them to SpaceX for use in data centers the company selects, with the hardware delivered in tranches. Each tranche will sit under its own lease schedule with a term of approximately five to five and a quarter years. SpaceX says the financing parties are led by Apollo and Goldman Sachs, which acted as sole structuring agent, and that BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and capital accounts advised by KKR made anchor commitments.
The agreement is not yet final in the legal sense. The 8-K describes a binding commitment letter to enter into the master finance lease, and the signing of that lease remains subject to specified closing conditions. SpaceX expects the transaction to close before the end of 2026, and the individual lease schedules to begin in the first half of 2027, when the GPUs and related equipment are delivered. The fixed interest rate that will apply to the lease has not been disclosed, because the filing says it will be set at pricing before the master lease is executed.
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HOW THE MASTER FINANCE LEASE IS STRUCTURED.
The 8-K gives a fairly precise picture of the mechanics. SpaceX expects the aggregate principal payments under all lease schedules to total approximately $40 billion. Rent is paid quarterly in advance, and each quarterly payment generally consists of one-twentieth of the financed cost of the relevant tranche, a fixed-rate charge on the outstanding balance, and certain ongoing costs. Twenty quarterly principal installments correspond to five years, which is consistent with the stated lease term of roughly five to five and a quarter years.
On those terms, if the full $40 billion were drawn and every tranche were in repayment at the same time, the principal portion alone would amount to about $2 billion per quarter, before the interest charge and other costs are added. In practice the payments will ramp up gradually, since each schedule only starts when its tranche of hardware is delivered, and the filing does not provide a delivery calendar beyond the first half of 2027 start.
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Term | What SpaceX disclosed |
Size | About $40 billion in aggregate principal payments |
Lessor | An entity managed by Apollo Global Management |
Equipment | GPU pods and related equipment, NVIDIA Vera Rubin |
Lease term | About 5 to 5.25 years per tranche |
Rent | Quarterly in advance: 1/20 of tranche cost plus fixed-rate charge and costs |
Interest rate | Fixed, to be set at pricing (not yet disclosed) |
Expected closing | Before year-end 2026, subject to conditions |
Lease start | First half of 2027, on delivery of the GPUs |
Arrangers and anchors | Apollo, Goldman Sachs (sole structuring agent); BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, KKR-advised accounts |
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A finance lease of this kind lets SpaceX use the hardware without paying for it upfront, while the lessor owns the equipment and is repaid from the rent. For accounting purposes, finance leases are recorded on the balance sheet as liabilities, so the commitment will add to the company's reported obligations as tranches commence. The structure resembles the chip-leasing arrangements that other AI developers have adopted in recent weeks, including Anthropic's planned lease of Broadcom AI chips through $63 billion of financing, and it reflects how quickly GPU fleets have become assets that lenders are willing to finance against.
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WHAT THE FINANCING MEANS FOR GROK AND SPACEX'S COMPUTE BUILDOUT.
SpaceX links the lease directly to its artificial intelligence business, which the company now reports as the Super Intelligence (SI) segment, the name it adopted for the segment previously reported as Artificial Intelligence. In the announcement, the company's chief financial officer said that SpaceX "aims to deploy the largest compute infrastructure in the world," and that the company is seeing "less than one year payback periods on our SI infrastructure investments." He added that the lease diversifies SpaceX's funding sources. The payback claim is the company's own assessment and is not broken down in the release, so it cannot be checked against disclosed figures.
The announcement states that the added compute is meant to power Grok for enterprises and consumers and to serve cloud services customers. That second use matters because SpaceX's third-quarter results describe compute capacity sold to outside customers as a growing part of the SI segment: the company says it signed additional cloud services agreements during the quarter, increasing its pipeline of SI infrastructure capacity for third-party customers. In other words, the Vera Rubin chips financed through this lease are not reserved solely for training and serving Grok models.
For people who use Grok, the announcement does not change anything immediately. SpaceX has not tied the lease to a specific model, product launch, usage limit or price change, and the hardware will only start arriving in the first half of 2027. What the deal does establish is the scale of the capacity SpaceX expects to add in 2027, which is the resource that ultimately determines how large future Grok models can be trained, how many users can be served at once and how much compute SpaceX can resell to cloud customers.
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THE THIRD-QUARTER NUMBERS BEHIND THE DEAL.
SpaceX's earnings release for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 explains why the company is looking beyond its own cash flow to finance compute. Total revenue reached $14,575 million, up from $5,576 million a year earlier, or about 2.6 times the prior-year level. The SI segment contributed $7,560 million of that total, about 52%, made up of $538 million in advertising revenue and $7,022 million from SI solutions and infrastructure. Connectivity, which includes Starlink, generated $5,248 million, and the Space segment, which includes launch, generated $1,767 million.
The SI segment's revenue includes Cursor, the AI coding company SpaceX acquired on August 14, 2026 at an implied equity value of $60 billion. Cursor contributed $608 million of revenue between the closing of the acquisition and September 30. SpaceX also cites increased Grok adoption and the launch of Grok Bot among the quarter's highlights, but it does not disclose Grok user or usage figures.
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Q3 2026 (USD millions) | Revenue | Operating income (loss) | Capital expenditures |
Super Intelligence (SI) | 7,560 | 431 | 16,444 |
Connectivity | 5,248 | 2,367 | 1,543 |
Space | 1,767 | (7) | 1,606 |
Total | 14,575 | 2,791 | 19,593 |
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The capital expenditure figures show where the money is going. Of $19,593 million in third-quarter capital expenditures, $16,444 million, or about 84%, went to the SI segment. Over the first nine months of 2026, SI capital expenditures reached $39,995 million, which is almost exactly the size of the new lease commitment. Measured against the third-quarter run rate, the $40 billion lease corresponds to roughly two and a half quarters of SI capital spending.
The SI segment reported operating income of $431 million in the quarter, an operating margin of under 6%, after $1,217 million of share-based compensation related to acquisitions. Connectivity remained the company's main source of profit, with operating income of $2,367 million. Total nameplate compute capacity reached 1.7 gigawatts on September 30, 2026, up from 1.4 gigawatts at the end of June and 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier, and the company says it continued the buildout of Colossus II during the quarter.
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BALANCE SHEET, FUNDING SOURCES AND RISKS.
At the end of September, SpaceX reported $51,294 million in cash and cash equivalents and $38,561 million in marketable securities, a position strengthened by $85,675 million in net proceeds from its initial public offering. Debt and finance leases totaled $38,844 million, of which $2,698 million was current. Over the first nine months of the year, operating cash flow was $13,097 million, while purchases of property, plant and equipment reached $48,069 million, so capital spending ran far ahead of the cash the business generated.
Against that background, the lease shifts a large part of the next round of GPU spending from upfront purchases to payments spread over about five years. If the full $40 billion is eventually drawn, the commitment would be comparable in size to the company's entire debt and finance lease balance at the end of the third quarter. That comparison is indicative rather than exact, because the lease will be recorded gradually as tranches commence, and because the final interest cost depends on a rate that has not yet been set.
The risks are those SpaceX lists in its forward-looking statements: whether the lease closes on time, whether the company can obtain, deploy and use the GPU pods as planned, whether it can scale and monetize its SI products and compute infrastructure, and how its capital expenditures, debt levels and financing terms evolve. Those caveats are standard in securities disclosures, but they are material here because the economic case for the lease depends on the SI business continuing to grow fast enough to absorb a five-year stream of rent payments. Large AI infrastructure financings have become frequent in recent weeks, from Meta's $35 billion stock offering and planned $60 billion at-the-market program to chip leasing structures, and SpaceX's deal is the largest committed GPU financing disclosed so far.
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WHAT IS ESTABLISHED AND WHAT REMAINS OPEN.
The verified facts come from SpaceX's announcement and its 8-K. SpaceX has a binding commitment to enter into a master finance lease with an Apollo-managed lessor covering about $40 billion of GPU pods and related equipment, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips. Rent is paid quarterly in advance over lease terms of about five to five and a quarter years, the deal is expected to close before the end of 2026, and the first lease schedules are expected to begin in the first half of 2027. Apollo and Goldman Sachs lead the financing, with anchor commitments from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and KKR-advised accounts.
Several important points remain undisclosed. SpaceX has not published the fixed interest rate, the number of GPUs or racks covered, the delivery schedule beyond the 2027 start, or which data centers will host the equipment. It has not said how the new capacity will be split between Grok and third-party cloud customers, and the claim of payback periods under one year on SI infrastructure is a management statement without a published calculation.
The broader reading is that SpaceX is financing the next stage of its AI buildout in the way a utility or airline might finance its fleet, by leasing the equipment over its useful life instead of buying it outright. The deal will add significant capacity behind Grok and SpaceX's cloud business from 2027, while tying a substantial share of the company's future cash flow to rent on hardware whose economic life is close to the length of the lease itself.
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