SpaceX, Oracle and Broadcom Pursue Tens of Billions in Debt to Fund AI Chip Buildouts

A wave of debt-financed AI chip buying is sweeping through the technology sector, led by SpaceX seeking roughly $40 billion in borrowings to purchase Nvidia GPUs, with Apollo and a consortium of banks in talks to provide the financing. Elon Musk said SpaceX intends to build its AI infrastructure exclusively around Nvidia, citing the Vera Rubin architecture as the strongest available option. The raise follows SpaceX's $86 billion June IPO and a $25 billion high-grade bond sale, underscoring the enormous capital appetite behind its data-center expansion. SpaceX credit risk hit a fresh high after the Financial Times first reported the plans.

The scale of the borrowing bonanza widened further late in the day when the Wall Street Journal reported that Broadcom is arranging more than $50 billion in financing for OpenAI's custom AI chip program, and that Oracle is also pursuing a blockbuster debt deal for chips. Apollo, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs are among the lenders in discussions across those transactions. The cluster of mega-deals in a single day illustrated how AI infrastructure spending has shifted from equity-funded buildouts to leveraged financing at a scale previously unseen in the technology industry.

Separately, Marvell Technology held an investor day that sent its shares up nearly 7 percent. CEO Matt Murphy said the company's implied data center revenue could top $30 billion by 2028, projected total revenue of about $20 billion for fiscal 2028 rising to between $70 billion and $90 billion by fiscal 2031, and put Marvell's total addressable market at roughly $400 billion by 2030. Marvell shares have already gained more than 240 percent in 2026, though the stock's RSI above 71 signals overbought conditions and the shares trade near 90 times earnings.

On the Terafab semiconductor complex, Musk clarified that Tesla and SpaceX will build and operate the facility, limiting TSMC to a potential sublease of part of the site with no ownership or direct operational role. TSMC ADRs fell 1.3 percent in pre-market trading on the news, while Intel shares rebounded 1.6 percent after Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan reaffirmed the company's active manufacturing partnership, including its 18A and I4A process nodes. Initial capital deployment for the Texas facility stands at $16.8 billion, with long-term projections reaching up to $119 billion and a target of over one terawatt of annual AI compute capacity.

The debt surge drew pointed warnings from prominent investors. Ray Dalio said the AI boom is a classic bubble nearing a bursting point, citing rising interest rates as a particular risk to debt-fueled spending. Rosenberg Research founder David Rosenberg noted that Nvidia alone now carries more weight in the S&P 500 than the smallest 256 index members combined, and that the average S&P 500 stock entered the week roughly 20 percent below its 52-week high, with the equal-weight index falling 4.4 percent in September even as the cap-weighted version gained 0.2 percent.