Nvidia owns nearly 123 million shares of SpaceX. That’s the number buried in an SEC filing released Friday, and it values the chipmaker’s position at nearly $21 billion as of the end of June.
Here’s the part the filing doesn’t spell out. SpaceX shares have fallen sharply since the company’s June initial public offering, which means that same stake is worth about $17 billion today. Nvidia lost roughly $4 billion on paper in a matter of weeks, and the disclosure landed anyway.
The xAI trade that turned into a rocket company
Nvidia didn’t buy into SpaceX directly. It invested in xAI, closing that deal in January, and Elon Musk merged the AI lab with SpaceX shortly afterward. The 123 million shares are the payoff from that sequence.
Whether you read that as foresight or luck depends on how much credit you give Jensen Huang for knowing what Musk was about to do.
Musk went exclusive, and said so out loud
On SpaceX’s first public earnings call last week, Musk confirmed the company had an exclusive arrangement with Nvidia for its data centers.
“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.”
So the investor is also the supplier, and the customer just committed to buying only from the investor. That’s the shape of most of Nvidia’s recent dealmaking.
$100 billion out the door in two years
Nvidia has committed more than $100 billion to AI companies since 2024. The list includes cloud computing start-ups like CoreWeave and AI labs including Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence.
It also backed Cursor, the code-editing start-up. SpaceX acquired Cursor this week for $60 billion.
Count the connections there. Nvidia invested in a start-up, and a company Nvidia holds $17 billion of just bought it, while committing to Nvidia hardware exclusively.
The $500 billion loan structure is the bigger story
This week Nvidia disclosed plans to assemble more than $500 billion from a consortium including Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR, aimed at financing its own customers.
The mechanism matters. Nvidia plans to partially guarantee loans from those Wall Street investors, and the loans are backed by the value of its chips.
Nvidia is underwriting the debt that buys Nvidia hardware, with Nvidia hardware as collateral. If chip values hold, everyone’s fine. If they don’t, the guarantee and the collateral degrade at the same time.
What SpaceX actually needs the silicon for
Musk told investors last week that SpaceX plans to grow its computing capacity from 2 gigawatts at the end of this year to “closer to 10GW [than 5GW]” by the end of 2027.
That’s a fivefold jump in two years, and it explains why an exclusive supply relationship is worth locking down from both sides.
Google’s stake makes Nvidia’s look modest
For scale, put Nvidia’s $17 billion next to the returns SpaceX handed its earliest backers. Google owns roughly 7 percent of the rocket maker, according to FactSet data, from an original $900 million investment in 2015.
Google told investors in July that the stake was valued at about $94 billion. That’s a decade of patience against Nvidia’s several months, and the gap between $94 billion and $17 billion is what patience bought.
Nvidia, a $5.5 trillion company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing. Given how many of the names in this story appear on both sides of Nvidia’s balance sheet, that silence is the least surprising detail in it.
