SpaceX went public in June and is valued at more than $1.8 trillion, up from $7.8 billion in revenue last quarter — a price that assumes a lot goes right. And Nvidia, which reported earnings Aug. 26, is the company selling it the parts.
A Vera Rubin NVL72 hardware is a server cabinet a little taller than a refrigerator, and it's the newest thing Nvidia sells to data centers. SpaceX wants to strip one down, bolt it to solar panels and fly it in an orbit that keeps it in sunlight nearly all the time. From there, whatever it computes comes back to Earth over the same laser links Starlink satellites use to talk to each other. The company says each satellite will draw about 250 kilowatts at peak, and it has already asked the FCC for permission to launch up to a million of them.
What SpaceX gave up when it went exclusive with Nvidia
Back in June, Musk was saying the satellite's design could work with Nvidia's older GB300 chips, and that SpaceX would draw up a version for Google's TPUs as well. Two suppliers means a buyer can play one off the other on price. But on SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company, Musk dropped the second one.
"We've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture," Musk said. "We're exclusive to Nvidia."
That is a lot to give up on a satellite that hasn't flown, though it may not last. SpaceX and Tesla are planning a chip plant called Terafab, and SpaceX says one of the things it will make is chips for the space data centers, which would end the exclusivity once Musk's own factory is running.
Nvidia is also a shareholder. It put money into xAI in January, and that stake became SpaceX stock when the two companies merged in February. Nvidia's own balance sheet shows its holdings of other companies' stock jumped from $12.9 billion in January to $42.8 billion by the end of July, though Nvidia hasn't said how much of that is SpaceX. In other words, Nvidia sells SpaceX the racks and gets paid a second time when SpaceX's shares go up.
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What this means if Nvidia is in your 401(k)
Nvidia's data center business brought in $89 billion in the quarter it reported Aug. 26, up 117% from a year earlier, and the company expects $108 billion in total revenue this quarter. Rubin racks are already running at CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle. On top of that, Nvidia has lined up Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise more than $500 billion over time to finance AI infrastructure, though those deals aren't final yet.
So if you hold an index fund, you own Nvidia whether you chose it or not; it's the largest single holding in Vanguard's S&P 500 fund. Whatever SpaceX launches in 2028 won't be what moves it.
