Chipmaker discloses $21 billion stake in Elon Musk-owned rocket firm

Nvidia’s financial ties with Elon Musk’s SpaceX have come into focus after the chipmaking giant disclosed that it owns nearly 123 million shares in the rocket company. The stake was worth almost $21 billion at the end of June, but has since fallen to about $17 billion as SpaceX shares dropped sharply following its June initial public offering.The disclosure also sheds light on Nvidia’s investment in xAI, which was completed in January, shortly before Musk combined the AI lab with SpaceX.It also highlights Nvidia chief Jensen Huang’s efforts to use the financial strength of the $5.5 trillion company to build financial links across the AI industry, including with some of its biggest customers.Musk said during SpaceX’s first public earnings call last week that the company had an exclusive relationship with Nvidia to equip its data centres.“We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think [its] Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture,” he said, as cited by FT. “We think it’s the best AI computer and we greatly value our close co-operation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia.”Nvidia has committed more than $100 billion to AI companies over the past two years. Its investments include cloud computing start-ups such as CoreWeave and AI labs including Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence.The chipmaker has also invested in Cursor, the code-editing start-up that SpaceX acquired for $60 billion this week.Nvidia this week disclosed plans to put together more than $500 billion from a consortium of investors including Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to help finance its customers.Nvidia plans to partially guarantee loans from the Wall Street investors, with the loans backed by the value of its chips.The company’s financial commitments have helped accelerate the building of AI infrastructure and have tied parts of the industry more closely to Nvidia’s technology.SpaceX plans 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.The rocket company’s IPO has also generated huge returns for its early backers.Google owns roughly 7% of SpaceX, according to FactSet data, after initially investing $900 million in 2015. The search giant told investors in July that its stake was valued at about $94 billion.