Apollo to buy and lease $40 billion of Nvidia chips as SpaceX scales its AI cloud
From the AI digest for Nov 5, 2026
Thread: ai — SpaceX AI cloud · new
What happened: Apollo Global Management, the private-equity and lending giant, will buy roughly $40 billion of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips through a subsidiary and lease them to SpaceX, extending the chip-leasing deal SpaceX has already announced. Coverage builds that onto a projection that SpaceX could stand up about 13 GW of AI cloud capacity within roughly 18 months, repurposing its rocket-ship campus sites and putting a datacenter at the Terafab chip site in Texas.
What's genuinely new: The Apollo arrangement is spelled out as purchase-and-lease rather than debt, with Apollo described as vastly outspending the neoclouds on AI chips — a new heavyweight entering AI-chip financing beside the hyperscalers. The 13 GW, 18-month scale estimate is analyst projection, not a SpaceX-documented build plan.
Watch: Apollo's other AI-chip financing deals and their terms; whether SpaceX grounds the 13 GW projection in named sites and power contracts; how this sits beside the Terafab fab and SpaceX's separate orbital-compute push.
Links: The Information · SemiAnalysis · Nov 4, 9:00 AM ET