Nvidia doesn’t usually make headlines for what it owns. It makes them for what it sells. But one line in its latest stock filing has investors paying attention: the chipmaker now holds a stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX worth roughly $18 billion.
On the surface, a chip company holding shares in a rocket maker looks odd. Look closer and it starts to make a lot of sense, because Nvidia is now part supplier and part shareholder. SpaceX has turned into an AI business, and it happens to be one of Nvidia’s biggest customers.
The 13F disclosure and how an xAI stake became SpaceX shares
The stake came to light in August. Nvidia’s 13F filing, submitted on August 14, showed it held about 122.8 million SpaceX shares, making SpaceX its second-largest disclosed holding behind Intel, as reported by TheStreet. At the June 30 close, those shares were worth about $21 billion. The Intel position is a separate bet, built from 214.7 million shares Nvidia bought late last year.
Also read: Bank of America sends SpaceX stock investors strong signal
Nvidia never bought SpaceX stock on the open market. It participated in xAI’s $20 billion Series E funding round in January as one of several backers. When SpaceX bought xAI in an all-stock deal in February, the stake was converted into SpaceX shares.
The value has moved around since then. SpaceX shares were trading near $147 on October 23, which puts Nvidia’s stake at roughly $18 billion. The stock was priced at $135 in its June IPO and opened at $150 on its Nasdaq debut, before hitting a record high above $225 just weeks later.
This fits a pattern for Nvidia. The company tends to invest in AI-focused businesses that are also its customers or partners. In the filing, SpaceX ranked ahead of the cloud provider CoreWeave and sat behind only Intel.
SpaceX has become an AI company, and that has driven its growth
SpaceX’s latest numbers show why the bet looks less strange today. Revenue jumped 161% to $14.6 billion in the third quarter, beating analyst estimates, and the company swung to a $4.4 billion profit from a loss a year earlier.
The AI unit did most of the heavy lifting. Now called Super Intelligence, it brought in $7.56 billion, more than nine times its revenue a year ago and more than half of SpaceX’s total sales. Most of that comes from renting data centre computing power to companies like Anthropic and Google, though the unit also includes the Grok chatbot, X and the coding tool Cursor, SpaceX’s Q3 filing showed. Musk called it an “inflection moment” for the company.
Starlink and rockets still matter, but they’re no longer the main event. The connectivity segment, mostly Starlink, posted $5.25 billion in sales, while the space segment added $1.77 billion. SpaceX also guided for first-quarter 2027 revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion.
Its customer deals are huge. Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for computing power, and Google committed to $920 million a month for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, TheStreet reported. Those contracts depend on Nvidia hardware. Musk has even told investors SpaceX’s annual recurring revenue could reach $500 billion to $1 trillion by the end of 2027, far above the roughly $110 billion in full-year 2027 revenue that analysts project.
Nvidia never bought SpaceX stock on the open market. It participated in xAI’s $20 billion Series E funding round in January as one of several backers.Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Musk is going all in on Nvidia chips
That’s the part Jensen Huang can see clearly. On SpaceX’s first earnings call in August, Musk said the company would build its AI services exclusively on Nvidia systems. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture,” he said. “So we’re exclusive to Nvidia,” according to The Motley Fool. Nvidia shares rose more than 4% that day.
He doubled down on the third-quarter call. Musk said SpaceX’s new computing capacity next year will be mostly Nvidia’s Vera Rubin, as the company pushes deeper into AI infrastructure.
Then came the money. On October 25, Musk said SpaceX had closed $40 billion in debt financing to purchase GPUs. “This is primarily callable debt for GPU purchases that will arrive in Q1 and Q2,” he said. He credited SpaceX’s investment-grade rating and its Starlink and launch revenue for keeping credit flowing. Given his exclusivity pledge, much of that spending looks headed Nvidia’s way.
More SpaceX:
Goldman Sachs revamps SpaceX stock estimates before crucial earnings test
Musk called Anthropic ‘evil’; SpaceX’s deal with it nearly doubled
Morgan Stanley doubles down on SpaceX stock verdict for investors
Musk also took a swipe at smaller players. He predicted “guppy-level death and consolidation” among the more than 200 so-called neoclouds, while saying SpaceX could “rent out our compute several times over,” as reported by TheStreet. He added that SpaceX plans to use about half its computing power itself and rent out the rest, and that it isn’t interested in buying any of those struggling rivals.
What Huang sees, and what could go wrong
Nvidia is positioned to win on both ends. It sells SpaceX the chips that power its AI push, and it owns a stake in the company that profits from it. Few investors get that kind of view into a customer’s plans.
The bet isn’t risk-free. SpaceX spent $19.6 billion on capital projects in the third quarter, mostly on AI and data centres, and expects to spend $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth, according to SpaceX’s Q3 filing. That’s a lot of borrowed and earned cash riding on demand for computing power staying strong. SpaceX’s finance chief said new capacity pays for itself in under a year at current prices, but that math only holds if rental rates do.
Musk’s ambitions stretch even further. He has said SpaceX plans to launch Vera Rubin systems into space next year. If those plans pay off, Nvidia’s stake could be worth far more than $18 billion. If they stall, Huang’s biggest customer could also become one of his biggest headaches.
Related: Elon Musk’s latest move brings good news for Nvidia investors