Nvidia has revealed a $17 billion stake in SpaceX, showing just how tangled its AI cash web has become.
According to the Financial Times the $5.5 trillion chipmaker disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in SpaceX, one of its biggest customers.
According to a Friday SEC filing, Nvidia owned SpaceX stock worth nearly $21 billion at the end of June. Elon Musk’s rocket outfit has since seen its shares fall sharply after its June initial public offering, cutting Nvidia’s stake to about $17 billion.
The disclosure marks a huge pay-off from Nvidia’s investment in xAI, completed in January, shortly before Musk rolled the AI lab into SpaceX.
It shows the scale of Nvidia chief Jensen Huang’s push to use the financial clout of the world’s most valuable company to build circular AI industry ties. Those links include some of Nvidia’s largest customers, which is handy if you like your supply chain with a side order of dependency.
During SpaceX’s first public earnings call last week, SpaceX chief Elon Musk said the company had an exclusive relationship with Nvidia to kit out its data centres.
“We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think its Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer and we greatly value our close co-operation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk said.
Nvidia has committed more than $100 billion to AI companies in the past two years. That includes sizeable investments in cloud computing start-ups such as CoreWeave and in AI labs such as Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence.
It has invested in Cursor, the code-editing start-up that SpaceX acquired for $60 billion this week. This week, Nvidia disclosed plans to pull together more than $500 billion from a consortium of investors to help finance its customers. The line-up includes Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR.
Nvidia plans to partly guarantee loans from the cocaine-nosed jobs on Wall Street, backed by the value of its chips. Nvidia’s largesse has helped accelerate AI infrastructure development and tie more of the industry more tightly to its technology.
SpaceX is planning to increase its computing capacity from 2 gigawatts at the end of this year to “closer to 10GW [than 5GW]” by the end of 2027, Musk told investors last week.
