SpaceX Leases $40 Billion in AI Chips

Elon Musk's SpaceX has struck a $40 billion leasing deal with Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. The money will fund artificial intelligence (AI) chips and data center equipment. Apollo will buy the hardware and then lease it to SpaceX for roughly five to five and a quarter years. Deliveries are set to begin in 2027. SpaceX says this is the largest leasing deal in history. SpaceX's AI division includes the Grok chatbot, the Cursor coding tool, and cloud computing services. In just the last quarter, these brought in $7.6 billion out of the company's total revenue of $14.6 billion. That is more than SpaceX made from Starlink satellite broadband and rocket launches combined.

The $40 billion figure comes from a standard leasing setup: Apollo buys the AI chips, then leases them to SpaceX. This way, SpaceX gets access to compute without adding debt to its own balance sheet. It is not really about how well Grok performs. It is more about a growing trend of financing AI infrastructure with borrowed money. SpaceX claims it will pay back the investment in under a year. That is a bold claim. It may get tested hard once AI adoption starts to cool off.