Nvidia disclosed in a quarterly financial filing this week that it held roughly 122.8 million Class A shares of SpaceX worth nearly $21 billion as of June 30, making Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company the chipmaker's second-largest publicly disclosed equity holding behind Intel. The figure, reported Friday by CNBC and other outlets, is the first time the value of Nvidia's SpaceX position has been made public.
The stake did not come from an open-market purchase. It traces back to a $10 billion investment Nvidia made in January as part of a $20 billion funding round for xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence startup. When SpaceX acquired xAI the following month in an all-stock deal valued at $1.25 trillion, Nvidia's xAI shares converted automatically into SpaceX stock. SpaceX completed its own initial public offering in June, giving the position its first public market price.
Alongside the SpaceX disclosure, Nvidia also reported a roughly $30 billion stake in Intel as of June 30 — up sharply from about $9.5 billion three months earlier — tied to a $5 billion investment and chip-development partnership the two companies announced in 2025. Together, Intel and SpaceX now account for close to 80% of Nvidia's publicly disclosed stock portfolio, which also includes smaller positions in Coherent, Generate Biomedicines, Nebius Group, Nokia and Synopsys.
The numbers are already dated. SpaceX shares closed at $140 on Friday, down from $170.86 at the end of June, trimming the value of Nvidia's stake to roughly $17.2 billion — a reminder that pricing on a stock barely two months removed from its public debut remains volatile. Even at the lower figure, the position represents an outsized return on an investment Nvidia made less than a year ago.
An exclusivity pact with a rocket company
The equity stake sits on top of a deepening commercial relationship. On SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company, Musk said the company would build its AI data centers exclusively on Nvidia chips, using the upcoming Vera Rubin architecture, with what he called a "significant allocation" of the new processors expected in 2027. That commitment mirrors similar exclusivity arrangements Nvidia has struck with other large compute buyers as it works to lock in demand for successive generations of GPUs.
The relationship is also newly consolidated on paper. xAI formally rebranded as SpaceXAI in July, folding the AI unit — along with the social platform X, which SpaceX acquired in 2025 — into a single corporate structure spanning social media, AI development and space hardware. Grok, the chatbot, kept its name even as the corporate entity behind it changed.
Scrutiny of circular AI financing
The disclosure adds a concrete data point to a debate that has followed Nvidia's investment strategy for more than a year: the company has taken equity stakes in several customers and partners — Intel, xAI/SpaceX, Nebius and others — that in turn spend heavily on Nvidia hardware. Critics of these arrangements argue they make it harder to distinguish organic demand for AI chips from revenue effectively recycled through Nvidia's own balance sheet. Nvidia has not detailed the accounting treatment of the SpaceX position beyond the filing itself, and the company did not accompany the disclosure with commentary on its investment strategy.
For Musk, the filing offers an outside valuation of a company that, unlike SpaceX's satellite and rocket businesses, had never previously priced its AI ambitions on public markets. For Nvidia, it is a reminder that the company's fortunes are now tied not just to how many chips it sells, but to the market value of the companies buying them.
Nvidia is expected to report its next quarterly earnings later this month, which should offer more detail on how the company is accounting for its equity stakes and whether SpaceX's post-IPO volatility has affected its reported results. In the meantime, the SpaceX position stands as one of the clearest illustrations yet of how tightly Nvidia's chip business, its balance sheet and Musk's sprawling corporate empire have become intertwined.
