Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) is taking a page from Warren Buffett’s playbook, deploying a growing share of its cash hoard into equities — and its latest bet is on Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX).
The chipmaker disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it acquired 122.7 million shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., a stake valued at $21 billion. The purchase helped lift Nvidia’s total stock portfolio to $63.4 billion, a substantial portion of its $80.6 billion cash position.
The expansion was abrupt. Three months earlier, Nvidia reported just $18.4 billion in stock holdings, more than half of that a $9.5 billion position in rival Intel Corp. In one quarter, the portfolio grew by $45 billion, or about 250%, while the S&P 500 rose 14.9%.
Nearly half of that increase came from Intel, whose shares surged 216.4% in the second quarter, pushing Nvidia’s stake to $30 billion. The new SpaceX position accounted for most of the rest, alongside a $4.5 billion increase in Nvidia’s Nebius holdings. All told, Nvidia injected $25.5 billion of fresh capital into its investment portfolio during the quarter.
The result is a highly concentrated book: Intel now represents 44.2% of the portfolio and SpaceX 30.9%, together more than three-quarters of the total. The remaining six holdings each make up single-digit percentages.
The SpaceX bet reflects years of mutual admiration between Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and Musk. On SpaceX’s most recent earnings call, Musk said the company would build exclusively on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture, calling it “the best AI computer” and citing “close cooperation and partnership on many levels.”
Huang has returned the praise, describing SpaceX’s Grok chatbot and Tesla Inc.’s vehicles as “world-class” and calling Musk an “extraordinary engineer.” He went further in a podcast interview, referring to Musk as “the ultimate GPU” for his ability to retain information across disciplines.
Huang also credits Musk with early support for Nvidia’s first AI-focused system, the DGX-1. “When I announced DGX-1, nobody in the world wanted it,” Huang said. “Except for Elon.”
The relationship is increasingly commercial as well as personal. Nvidia posted revenue of $96.2 billion last quarter, up 106% year over year, with data center sales rising 117% to $89 billion. The company doesn’t break out customer-level revenue, but Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster estimates SpaceX now accounts for about 5% of Nvidia’s overall revenue, up from roughly 3% the previous quarter — implying nearly $5 billion in quarterly contribution.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told analysts that Nvidia’s next-generation Vera CPU is already shipping to early customers, with SpaceX’s AI unit among the first. SpaceXAI President Mike Nicolls said in a statement that Vera provides “the CPU performance and memory bandwidth to run enormous amounts of orchestration, code, and data processing while keeping GPUs doing what they do best.”
The two companies also confirmed this week that a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system will launch aboard SpaceX’s first-generation Starmind satellite in the fourth quarter of 2027, with larger deployment planned for 2028. The AI1 satellite design carries a 120-kilowatt compute payload, peaking at 150 kilowatts.
For Nvidia, SpaceX is emerging as both a top-tier terrestrial customer and the launch vehicle for putting its data center chips in orbit. For SpaceX, Nvidia technology is becoming the backbone of its computing and AI ambitions. What started as a supplier relationship is deepening into something far more intertwined.
