HAWTHORNE, Calif. — Nvidia has quietly become one of SpaceX's biggest institutional backers, disclosing a roughly $21 billion stake in Elon Musk's rocket-and-AI company in a regulatory filing made public Friday.
The position, revealed in Nvidia's quarterly 13F, comprises about 122.8 million SpaceX Class A shares and now stands as the chipmaker's second-largest disclosed equity holding, behind only its Intel stake. Together, SpaceX and Intel account for more than 80 percent of Nvidia's publicly reported stock portfolio — a striking vote of confidence in the company at the center of Musk's AI ambitions.
How Nvidia Ended Up Owning SpaceX
The stake traces back to Nvidia's participation in xAI's $20 billion funding round in January 2026. When SpaceX absorbed xAI in an all-stock merger in February, valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, Nvidia's xAI shares converted into SpaceX Class A stock. SpaceX then completed the largest IPO on record in June, raising more than $85 billion and giving public investors their first look at the company's soaring valuation.
At SpaceX's June 30 price of $170.86, Nvidia's holding was worth roughly $21 billion, or about a third of its disclosed portfolio. The position remains substantial even after the stock's summer pullback toward $140.
An Alliance Built on AI Compute
The financial tie reflects a deepening commercial partnership. On SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company on August 4, Musk said the firm would build its AI infrastructure "exclusively on Nvidia," praising the company's next-generation Vera Rubin architecture as "the best AI computer." That commitment matters: SpaceX's AI segment reached $2.56 billion in the second quarter — a 312 percent sequential jump — and Musk said the company expects to run more than 2 gigawatts of compute by the end of 2026, scaling toward 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, all powered by Nvidia silicon. The momentum builds on the surging revenue SpaceX reported earlier this month.
That buildout already anchors marquee deals, including a reported $1.25-billion-a-month lease of SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis and a multi-year Google agreement worth roughly $920 million a month. Musk has even floated Starmind, a plan to place Nvidia GPUs on satellites and extend the partnership into orbit.
Some analysts have debated the "circular" nature of chipmakers investing in their biggest customers, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back firmly, insisting "the demand is real." For SpaceX, the filing simply puts a number on what the market already suspected: one of the world's most valuable companies is betting billions on Musk's vision. Bloomberg first detailed the holdings in its coverage of the 13F filing, and investors will get a fuller picture when Nvidia reports earnings on August 26.
