A filing with the SEC made public on Friday contains a figure Nvidia never announced: the chipmaker holds just under 123 million SpaceX shares, a position valued at close to $21 billion as of the end of June.
What the paperwork leaves unsaid is what happened next. SpaceX stock has slid steeply since the company went public in June, and at today’s prices that same block of shares is worth roughly $17 billion. Around $4 billion in paper value evaporated in a span of weeks — and the disclosure went out regardless.
How an AI bet became a rocket stake
There was never a direct purchase of SpaceX stock. Nvidia put money into xAI, wrapping up that transaction in January, and Elon Musk folded the AI lab into SpaceX not long after. Those 123 million shares are what came out the other end.
Calling it vision or calling it fortune comes down to how much you believe Jensen Huang saw Musk’s next move coming.
Musk said the quiet part on the record
During SpaceX’s debut earnings call as a public company last week, Musk acknowledged that its data centers run on an exclusive deal with Nvidia.
“We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think [its] Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture,” he said. “We think it’s the best AI computer and we greatly value our close co-operation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia.”
The backer doubles as the vendor, and the buyer has now pledged to source hardware from nobody else. Nearly all of Nvidia’s recent deals follow that same pattern.
More than $100 billion deployed in two years
Since 2024, Nvidia has pledged upward of $100 billion to AI companies. Among the recipients are cloud computing start-ups such as CoreWeave, alongside AI labs including Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence.
Cursor, the code-editing start-up, is on that list too. This week, SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion.
Trace the loop: Nvidia funded a start-up, and that start-up was then acquired by a company in which Nvidia holds $17 billion — a company that has simultaneously agreed to buy Nvidia chips and nothing else.
The real headline is the $500 billion loan machine
Nvidia revealed this week that it intends to pull together more than $500 billion from a consortium whose members include Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR — capital earmarked for financing Nvidia’s own customers.
Pay attention to how it works. Nvidia will partially guarantee the loans extended by those Wall Street firms, and the value of its chips serves as the backing for that debt.
In other words, Nvidia is guaranteeing borrowing used to purchase Nvidia products, secured by Nvidia products. Should chip valuations stay firm, nobody gets hurt. Should they slip, the guarantee and the collateral weaken in lockstep.
Why SpaceX needs that much silicon
Musk informed investors last week that the company intends to scale its computing footprint from 2 gigawatts by the close of this year to “closer to 10GW [than 5GW]” by the end of 2027.
Multiplying capacity fivefold inside two years is exactly the kind of ramp that makes an exclusive supply agreement attractive to both parties.
Next to Google, Nvidia’s haul looks small
Measure Nvidia’s $17 billion against what SpaceX delivered to its first investors. FactSet data puts Google’s holding at approximately 7 percent of the rocket company, grown from a $900 million check written in 2015.
In July, Google told investors that position was worth roughly $94 billion. Ten years of holding on versus Nvidia’s handful of months — the distance from $17 billion to $94 billion is the price of that patience.
Nvidia, valued at $5.5 trillion, did not immediately respond when asked to comment on the filing. With so many of the companies named here sitting on both sides of Nvidia’s books, the silence is the least remarkable thing about the whole affair.