STARBASE, Texas — SpaceX expects to pay about $40 billion in principal on a finance lease for GPU pods and related data-center equipment. The company, formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., disclosed the arrangement in a regulatory filing on Monday.
The terms are in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A commitment letter was signed on Oct. 24, the filing said, and the counterparty is an entity managed by Apollo Global Management, Inc.
The Apollo-managed entity — the filing calls it the Lessor — will buy the equipment and lease it to SpaceX for data centers the company picks.
The equipment will arrive in tranches. Each tranche will sit under its own lease schedule, running about five to five and a quarter years from the date that schedule starts, the filing said.
Rent is due quarterly, in advance. For each tranche, SpaceX said the payment will generally cover one-twentieth of the financed cost, plus an amount worked out at a fixed annual rate on the outstanding balance, plus certain ongoing costs and expenses. The fixed rate has not been set. The filing said it will be determined at pricing, before SpaceX signs the master finance lease.
SpaceX said it expects the master lease to close before the end of the year, subject to certain closing conditions. The lease schedules are expected to start in the first half of 2027, once the GPUs are delivered.
Musk wrote about the financing on X on Sunday, a day before the filing appeared. Musk said SpaceX had closed $40 billion of debt financing for GPUs, and he said the money was aimed mainly at chips arriving in the first and second quarters and would not be a major factor in the current quarter, according to Reuters.
The Sunday posts also carried a warning for the smaller cloud providers that rent out AI computing power. CoreWeave fell 4.5% in premarket trading on Monday, Nebius Group fell 3.4% and IREN fell 3.3%, Reuters reported. Applied Digital and TeraWulf each lost more than 2%, and Core Scientific lost 1.7%.
Bret Johnsen, the chief financial officer, signed the filing. It is dated Oct. 26 and includes the customary note that forward-looking statements are not guarantees. None of that is final. SpaceX said the deal could still collapse, or close later and on different terms, and the equipment deliveries, lease terms and principal total could all come in different from what it now expects.
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