SpaceX’s AI business got two price tags on Monday. Anthropic’s IPO filing says the Claude maker has agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion on SpaceX compute through 2029, and SpaceX put its own $40 billion GPU financing on paper with Apollo as the lessor. One deal brings chips in, the other brings customers.
Anthropic’s $120.5 billion line item
The number sits in the commitments section of the S-1 Anthropic made public on Monday, Oct. 26 (we covered the rest of the filing in our S-1 breakdown). Between May and October, Anthropic “entered into and amended several agreements” with SpaceX.AI LLC, the former X.AI LLC and now a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary, for compute running on Nvidia GPUs. In the filing’s words, it “agreed to spend an aggregate of up to $120.5 billion over terms extending into 2029.”
The run rate is the eye-opener. Once all the capacity is delivered, which Anthropic expects in December 2026, it pays about $3.1 billion a month, or roughly $37.2 billion a year, as Sawyer Merritt pointed out. For scale, SpaceX’s total revenue for the third quarter was $14.58 billion. Three months of Anthropic at the full rate would be about $9.3 billion.
There’s a catch, and the filing spells it out. Fees run differently while capacity ramps up, and after initial non-cancelable periods ending in January 2027 and March 2027, “each agreement may be cancelled by either party upon 90 days’ advance written notice.” So “up to” is doing real work in that sentence. Drive Tesla Canada flagged the same termination rights. SpaceX is one of several Nvidia suppliers for Anthropic, alongside Microsoft, Nscale and Lambda, and the company also runs on Google TPUs, AWS Trainium and AMD GPUs.
The $40 billion lease, in writing
Musk said over the weekend that SpaceX had “closed” $40 billion of GPU debt, which we covered on Sunday. The official version came Monday morning in a SpaceX release and an 8-K filing, and the paperwork is a little more precise. On Oct. 24, SpaceX signed a binding commitment letter for a master finance lease with an Apollo-managed entity. Apollo’s side buys the GPU pods and related equipment and leases them to SpaceX:
- Aggregate principal payments of about $40 billion, which SpaceX calls the largest committed GPU financing ever.
- The chips are Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin, for SpaceX’s data centers on the ground.
- Equipment arrives in tranches, each with its own lease of about five to five and a quarter years, with rent paid quarterly at one-twentieth of the financed cost plus a fixed rate set at pricing.
- Apollo and Goldman Sachs lead the financing, with Goldman as sole structuring agent. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and KKR-advised accounts made anchor commitments.
- Closing is expected before the end of 2026, and the leases start as GPUs arrive in the first half of 2027.
The interest rate isn’t set yet, MarketWatch noted. PitchBook pointed out it tops the $36 billion structured-notes deal Apollo and Blackstone put together this summer to buy GPUs and lease them to Anthropic. Same lender, other side of the table.
CFO Bret Johnsen’s quote is the one investors will circle: “we’re seeing less than one year payback periods on our SI infrastructure investments.” Put the two filings together and the pitch looks like this. Lease the newest chips over five years, rent the capacity to Grok and to paying customers such as Anthropic, and let monthly checks cover the bill. Whether that holds depends on those 90-day exit clauses never getting used.
For readers in Japan, this is the same SpaceX that sells Starlink here through KDDI and docomo. Its AI arm is now a supplier to one of Grok’s biggest rivals, and the next real data point lands in SpaceX’s Q4 numbers early next year.
Sources: Anthropic Form S-1 (SEC), SpaceX investor release, SpaceX Form 8-K (SEC), Drive Tesla Canada, Sawyer Merritt on X (2), PitchBook, MarketWatch, Reuters via Yahoo Finance.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: The Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street in Manhattan, home of Apollo Global Management’s headquarters, May 2024. Photo: Sir MemeGod, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped).
