Apollo and Goldman Shop $40 Billion of SpaceX Chip Debt as AI Stocks Slide

What is being sold. Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global Management have begun approaching investors to sell portions of the roughly $40 billion financing behind SpaceX's AI chip purchases, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, with some investors asked to take stakes of up to $500 million ahead of a formal syndication. Fuller accounts of the Bloomberg report describe the package as an $8.3 billion senior-secured loan that Goldman led and will sell to banks, plus several bond tranches aimed at asset managers, with Apollo as a principal investor in the bonds and PIMCO also participating; the borrowing vehicle is managed by Atlas SP, an Apollo-backed company. Two cautions belong on the record: Reuters, which carried the Bloomberg story, said it could not independently verify it, and Goldman declined to comment while Apollo and SpaceX did not respond. No launch date, allocation or demand figure has been reported. This is a sounding, not a priced deal.

The deal underneath, as filed. The hard terms are in SpaceX's Form 8-K filed with the SEC on October 26. On October 24 the company signed a binding commitment letter — not a closed lease — for a master finance lease with an entity managed by Apollo: the lessor buys GPU pods and related equipment and leases them to SpaceX data centers in tranches over terms of about 5 to 5.25 years. Rent is payable quarterly in advance: one-twentieth of the financed cost, plus a fixed rate on the outstanding balance that has not been set yet — the filing says it will be determined at pricing, before SpaceX signs the lease. Aggregate principal payments are expected to total about $40 billion, the transaction is expected to close before year-end, and lease schedules start in the first half of 2027 as the hardware is delivered. The filing also warns the deal may not close on the anticipated terms, or at all. The company's October 26 announcement names the hardware — Nvidia Vera Rubin chips for its terrestrial compute buildout — with Goldman as sole structuring agent and anchor commitments from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and KKR. Bloomberg reports a $7 billion lease prepayment from SpaceX takes the total equipment value to about $47.3 billion; that figure is not in the filing.

Why the structure matters. The borrowing sits in the Apollo vehicle, not on SpaceX's corporate balance sheet, which shields the company's credit ratings — its own Q3 balance sheet already carries $38.8 billion of debt and finance leases. What lenders get in exchange: rent that deal documents describe as absolute, principal that fully amortizes over the lease term, and title to the GPUs themselves. What they do not get, per Bloomberg's account of the deal documents, is a residual-value guarantee — if five-year-old AI chips are worth little at the end of the lease, that loss belongs to investors. That is the exact opposite of the last record deal: in the roughly $36 billion Apollo–Blackstone lease that bought Google TPUs for Anthropic, Broadcom provides residual-value support on about $31 billion of senior debt. SpaceX's lenders are carrying the chip-depreciation risk themselves, and they committed before the price — the fixed rate — was set, into a market that has since cooled.

The credit underneath. SpaceX can point to a blowout quarter: its Q3 10-Q, filed October 22, shows revenue of $14.575 billion, up 161%, net income of $4.404 billion, and $89.9 billion of cash and securities against that $38.8 billion of debt and finance leases. The nine-month figure is still a net loss of $413 million, and the filing shows one unnamed customer — Customer B — accounted for 34.5% of Q3 revenue, all in the AI segment; Bloomberg has identified that customer as Anthropic, which the filing itself does not name. Anthropic's own S-1 allows either side to cancel its SpaceX compute agreements on 90 days' notice, against lease payments SpaceX owes for five years — the mismatch critics of GPU debt keep pointing at. The credit market has noticed the leverage building across the AI complex: SpaceX five-year CDS traded around 226 basis points in October, a record and roughly double its June level, though still a fraction of CoreWeave's roughly 1,090.

Why this week is the test. The soundings are landing in the worst week AI debt and AI equities have had in months. On Thursday the Nasdaq fell 5.3% into correction territory; SpaceX shares traded at $126.81 in the afternoon, down 6.7% on the day and below the $135 IPO price, while Tesla fell 10.5% to $344.92. Reuters ties the Musk-complex slide to the Democratic midterm sweep — Texas results raised the prospect of data-center moratoria, and Goldman itself has estimated that Democratic state and local wins could affect about 45% of planned U.S. data-center capacity expansion. The same election cloud hangs over the other Musk story in the filings: both SpaceX's and Tesla's Q3 10-Qs disclose special committees of disinterested directors exploring a deeper combination of the two companies, Tesla's noting any deal needs its committee's recommendation and shareholder approval. None of that makes the SpaceX lease unsellable — the borrower is investment-grade, the rent is contractual and the collateral is the most sought-after hardware on earth. But the price of the fixed rate, when it is set, will be the market's first hard number on what GPU risk costs after the selloff. Figures from company filings are as filed; the syndication, tranche split and prepayment are as reported by Bloomberg and are not confirmed by the companies. This is a news summary, not investment advice.