NEW YORK — SpaceX is in talks to borrow about $40 billion, mostly to buy Nvidia chips for its artificial intelligence data centers, according to reports published Wednesday. The financing would be led by Apollo Global Management.
The financing has not been finalized. Asked whether the company had decided how the chips would be paid for, a spokesperson for the financing industry said that question was “the kind of thing you ask after the chips are installed.”
Dale Pruitt, a credit analyst at Harrow Point Capital, read the reported plan twice before calling it “a very confident sequence.” Pruitt said that, on his reading, the chips were scheduled to arrive in 2025, which is before the loans were proposed and before anyone ordered them.
“That is the efficient part,” Pruitt said. “You get the output first and then you find out what it cost, which is how everyone in this business has always wanted to find out what things cost.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said her organization had measured the timeline and found it “extremely efficient.” Asked to define the measurement, Teller said it was based on a survey of 40 people, all of whom had been asked whether they had heard of the chips, and 31 of whom said yes. The survey did not ask whether the chips had been ordered.
“Forty billion dollars is a number that is hard to picture,” Teller said. “So we pictured the chips as already working, which is how we would picture anything we were about to pay for.”
The talks were described as early-stage. Lenders have not agreed to terms, and the companies have not publicly confirmed the plan. Pruitt said the lack of a comment was a strength. “A company that has explained its debt is a company that has run out of things to say about it,” Pruitt said. “This one is saving it.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the plan showed a company that understood time better than most. “They are not waiting for the future to arrive,” Brickhouse said by phone from an airport lounge. “They are using it early, and paying for it later, which is what the future was always for. It’s just common sense.”
Pruitt said he expected the financing to be completed, in one form or another, before anyone asked how the chips had been running in the meantime. “Nothing is ever really finished in this business,” Pruitt said. “It just gets refinanced until somebody remembers the chips.”