Nvidia disclosed at the end of August that it owned roughly 122.8 million shares of Space Exploration Technologies, a position now worth about $18 billion. That makes SpaceX Nvidia's second-largest holding, behind Intel and ahead of CoreWeave, and gives a hard number to a stake that had previously been buried inside a broader filing.
The disclosure matters because it lands as SpaceX is already becoming one of Nvidia's biggest customers. Elon Musk said on SpaceX's Q3 conference call that the company's data centers will be exclusively using Nvidia's processors, and on Oct. 25 he said SpaceX had secured $40 billion in debt financing to buy GPUs. He added that the chips are expected to arrive in the first half of 2027, giving Nvidia a clearer line from investment to future demand.
The stake itself came from a prior investment in XAI that was folded into SpaceX, then renamed XSI, with the 'SI' standing for super intelligence. That link helps explain why Nvidia has so much exposure to a company whose third-quarter revenue rose 161% year over year to $14.6 billion. Within that total, the super intelligence segment jumped 830% to $7.56 billion and accounted for more than half of sales, while the connectivity segment posted $5.25 billion and the space segment $1.77 billion.
That is where the arrangement becomes unusual. Nvidia is not only selling the processors SpaceX says it wants; it is also an investor in the same business, so the upside from one side of the relationship can feed the other. Nvidia has long favored companies it already knows through customer and partnership ties, but this one is tighter than most because SpaceX's spending on GPUs could boost the same company that owns a multibillion-dollar piece of its equity.
What comes next is not whether SpaceX wants more Nvidia hardware. Musk has already answered that. The open question is how much of SpaceX's AI and data center buildout turns into revenue that lands back at Nvidia, and whether the $18 billion stake grows into something far larger if SpaceX's artificial intelligence strategy keeps accelerating.
