Apollo nears $5.4B loan for NVIDIA chip purchase
Apollo Global Management is wrapping up a $3.4 billion loan to an investment vehicle arranged by Valor Equity Partners, which will use the cash to buy NVIDIA chips and lease them out to xAI.
The new setup
The new setup involves roughly $5.4 billion for the acquisition and lease of compute infrastructure.
The plan is to lease out powerful NVIDIA GB200 GPUs—basically high-end computer brains—for xAI's AI model training needs.
NVIDIA was a key backer in the previous round, and this deal could close as soon as this week.
xAI's valuation and the AI hardware race
xAI, known for its Grok AI model, relies on massive computing power—and after being acquired by SpaceX less than a week ago, it's now valued at $250 billion.
With big tech companies expected to spend more than $600 billion this year on chips and data centers, this kind of mega-deal shows just how intense the race for AI hardware has become.