Nvidia's $21B SpaceX stake reveals AI chip empire's circular strategy

Nvidia revealed in an SEC filing that it holds nearly 123 million SpaceX shares, valued at approximately $21 billion at the end of June — now roughly $17 billion after SpaceX's share price fell following its June IPO. The disclosure underscores how CEO Jensen Huang is leveraging Nvidia's $5.5 trillion market cap to forge intricate, often circular financial relationships across the AI industry, including with major customers like Elon Musk's rocket conglomerate. Nvidia's position originated from a January investment in xAI, completed just before Musk combined the AI lab with SpaceX.

SpaceX has doubled down on Nvidia, with Musk stating on its first public earnings call that the company builds exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture. Meanwhile, Nvidia has committed over $100 billion to AI startups in two years, including CoreWeave, Thinking Machines, Safe Superintelligence, and Cursor (which SpaceX acquired for $60 billion). This week, Nvidia unveiled plans to assemble a $500 billion investor consortium — featuring Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, and KKR — to finance customer purchases, with chip-backed loan guarantees. SpaceX plans to scale computing capacity from 2GW to nearly 10GW by 2027, while Google, an early investor, holds a ~7% stake now worth about $94 billion.