The Company Becomes a Major AI Player: SpaceX Borrows $40 Billion to Fund the Purchase of AI Chips

American billionaire Elon Musk announced Sunday on his social network X that the aerospace group SpaceX has raised $40 billion in debt to finance the purchase of new chips for artificial intelligence (AI). “This is mainly a repayable debt for purchases of GPUs (graphics processors, favored for AI) which will arrive in the first and second quarters,” replied Elon Musk in an exchange with an investor. However, he did not specify the maturity or the rate applied to this tranche of financing.

Towards a merger with Tesla? SpaceX announced during the presentation of its results on Tuesday its intention to invest between 35 and 40 billion dollars in the last quarter of this year, or double the third. But this tranche of financing is therefore planned for the beginning of 2027, which points to the group's desire to continue with this level of investment.

The aerospace group, which merged earlier this year with xAI, has become a major player in AI and achieved its first net profit during the third quarter, mainly thanks to the rental of its data centers. In the spring, SpaceX decided, to everyone's surprise, to rent part of these new capacities to external customers, in particular Anthropic. It is this new source of income which boosted the results of the Starbase (Texas) company in the third quarter.

Elon Musk aims to further transform SpaceX into a conglomerate by absorbing the other large company he heads, the automobile manufacturer Tesla. At the same time, SpaceX continues to build its "cloud" infrastructure at a rapid pace, that is to say mainly the expansion of the gigantic Colossus II data center, on the border between Mississippi and Tennessee.

Machine-translated from French