SpaceX’s $40 billion Apollo lease puts GPUs on a five-year rent schedule

SpaceX has signed a commitment for a roughly $40 billion equipment finance lease with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management to pay for the chips behind its AI plans, Bloomberg reported. SpaceX’s own 8-K filing confirms the size and structure, and says the deal has not yet closed.

What the filing says about the lease

According to the Form 8-K, signed by Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen on October 26, SpaceX entered a binding commitment letter on October 24 to sign a master finance lease. The lessor is described only as an entity managed by Apollo; it is not named. That lessor will buy and lease GPU pods and related equipment to SpaceX, for use at data centers the company chooses.

The equipment will arrive in tranches, each under its own lease schedule running about five to five and a quarter years. Rent is paid quarterly in advance. It combines a twentieth of the financed cost of each tranche with a fixed annual rate on the outstanding balance, plus certain ongoing costs. The rate is not disclosed: the filing says it will be set at pricing, before the master lease is signed. SpaceX expects total principal payments across all schedules to come to about $40 billion.

The schedules are expected to start in the first half of 2027, when the GPUs are delivered. Signing the master lease depends on closing conditions the filing does not detail, and SpaceX expects to complete it before the end of 2026. The filing also warns that the transaction may not close on the expected terms or timeline, or at all.

A commitment, not yet a closed deal

The wording matters because of what came before. On October 25, Elon Musk said on X that SpaceX had raised $40 billion in debt for GPUs, as we reported; CNBC and Bloomberg carried his claim that it had closed. The filing is more careful: it describes a signed commitment with closing still ahead. It also names no banks or bondholders, and Musk’s post named no lender. The Apollo link comes from the filing and from Bloomberg’s report.

Nor does the filing say which chips SpaceX is buying or from whom. It refers only to GPU pods, so the supplier, the number of units and the price per unit are all unknown. The sources do not say whether the lease will carry any purchase option at the end of its term.

What to watch as the lease moves toward closing

The structure is a lease rather than a bond or a loan, so the chips are financed by a third party that owns them while SpaceX pays rent. Our explainer on GPU-backed debt covers how AI hardware and customer contracts have become collateral for lenders, and this deal follows that pattern at a much larger scale than most.

It also lands in the middle of Musk’s argument about the rest of the market. He predicted that more than 200 neoclouds, the companies that rent out GPU capacity, face what he called “guppy-level death and consolidation”, and CNBC reported that CoreWeave, Nebius and Iren each fell more than 4% in premarket trading on Monday after his comments. Those moves can reverse once regular trading opens, so they are a weak signal. A $40 billion lease from a large private-credit manager is one indicator that capital for AI hardware is still available to a buyer with SpaceX’s profile.

Three things would confirm or contradict the picture:

• Closing: whether the master lease is signed before the end of 2026, as the filing expects.
• Pricing: the fixed annual rate, which is not public yet and will show what Apollo charges for this risk.
• Deliveries: whether the first schedules start in the first half of 2027, as planned, which depends on the GPUs actually arriving.

SpaceX’s filing points readers to its quarterly reports for the risk factors, and its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30 is still to come. Until the lease closes and the rate is disclosed, the $40 billion remains an expected total of payments, not money already drawn.