Nvidia reveals $21B SpaceX stake
▼ Summary
– Nvidia disclosed owning nearly 123 million SpaceX shares, worth about $21 billion at the end of June, now valued at $17 billion after a share decline since SpaceX’s June IPO.
– The stake stems from Nvidia’s investment in xAI, completed in January before Elon Musk merged the AI lab with SpaceX, yielding a large financial payoff.
– The disclosure highlights Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s strategy of using the company’s financial power to create complex, circular financial ties across the AI industry, including with major customers.
– Musk stated on SpaceX’s first public earnings call that the company builds exclusively on Nvidia, citing the superiority of its Vera Rubin architecture.
– Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment on the disclosure.
Nvidia has revealed a major financial position in SpaceX, disclosing ownership of nearly 123 million shares in Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company. The revelation, tucked into a Friday SEC filing, shows the chipmaker held SpaceX stock valued at roughly $21 billion at the end of June. Given that SpaceX shares have dropped sharply since its June initial public offering, that stake is now worth closer to $17 billion.
The filing shines a light on the deepening financial entanglement between Nvidia and some of its most important customers. The stake stems from an investment Nvidia made in xAI back in January, completed just before Musk merged the AI lab into SpaceX. That move has now produced a substantial return on paper, even with the post-IPO slide.
More broadly, the disclosure underscores how Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has leveraged the balance sheet of the world’s most valuable company to build intricate, often circular financial relationships across the artificial intelligence sector. Those ties extend to some of the very firms that buy Nvidia’s chips in massive volumes.
Nvidia declined to comment on the filing when reached.
The relationship between the two companies was on display last week during SpaceX’s first public earnings call. Musk described an exclusive arrangement with Nvidia to supply the computing power for the company’s data centers. He said SpaceX had chosen to build entirely on Nvidia hardware, praising the upcoming Vera Rubin architecture as the best available. “We think it’s the best AI computer and we greatly value our close co-operation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk said.
(Source: Ars Technica)
