Nvidia disclosed in a regulatory filing Friday that its stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX was worth roughly $21 billion at the end of the second quarter, a position that has since lost about 18% of its value as the rocket maker’s shares pulled back from their post-IPO high.

The chipmaker said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it owns 122.8 million Class A shares of SpaceX, which completed its public market debut in June. SpaceX shares closed at $140 on Friday, down from $170.86 at the end of June, putting the current value of Nvidia’s holding at approximately $17.2 billion.

The SpaceX position is Nvidia’s second-largest equity holding, trailing only its stake in Intel, which is worth about $22 billion at current prices, down from $30 billion when the quarter ended. That Intel investment, made less than a year ago for $5 billion, has already generated a substantial return for the graphics chip giant.

According to FactSet data, Nvidia ranks as the sixth-largest investor in SpaceX. Musk remains by far the largest shareholder, with a stake worth approximately $850 billion. Alphabet holds the second-largest position at roughly $78 billion.

The origins of Nvidia’s SpaceX shares trace back to January, when the company invested $10 billion in Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI as part of a $20 billion funding round. SpaceX subsequently acquired xAI in February in a transaction valued at $1.25 trillion, converting Nvidia’s xAI stake into SpaceX equity. A person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because the deal’s exact terms were not made public, confirmed the share conversion.

The Nvidia-SpaceX Alliance Deepens

The financial disclosure comes amid growing signs of a strategic relationship between the two companies that extends well beyond passive investment. On SpaceX’s second-quarter earnings call earlier this month, Musk said the company will exclusively use Nvidia chips in its AI data centers.

“Going forward, we’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia. We’re exclusive to Nvidia,” Musk said on the call.

Musk also expressed confidence that SpaceX will receive a “significant allocation” of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs next year, positioning the space company to expand its AI computing capacity both on Earth and in orbit.

Investor Larry Goldberg, writing on social platform X, argued that the relationship between SpaceX and Nvidia is evolving into something far more substantial than a conventional chip-supplier arrangement. He pointed to SpaceX’s plans to use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture for AI infrastructure spanning terrestrial data centers and orbital computing systems, including the Starmind AI satellite payload program.

The proposed Starmind satellites would leverage Nvidia Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs to deliver data-center-level processing capabilities in orbit, while similar systems could support SpaceX’s ground facilities. SpaceX has discussed rapidly scaling its computing capacity, with targets exceeding 2 gigawatts by the end of 2026 and approaching 10 gigawatts the following year.

“Clearly this is more than buying compute in the normal course but a decision to standardize the entire AI infrastructure stack, terrestrial and orbital, on one supplier’s architecture,” Goldberg wrote.

TeraFab and Financing Considerations

Goldberg also highlighted the TeraFab semiconductor facility in Texas as another potential connection point between the two companies’ ecosystems, though Intel is the named manufacturing partner for that project. SpaceX and Tesla have committed an initial $16.8 billion to the Texas complex, with the facility designed to produce chips for edge inference in Optimus and Cybercab systems as well as high-power processors for space-based data centers.

While Nvidia has no formal role in TeraFab, Goldberg suggested that SpaceX’s exclusive commitment to Nvidia architecture and its need for specialized silicon could create synergies between the two efforts. He also noted that Nvidia’s $500 billion AI financing initiative could eventually support SpaceX’s ground and orbital infrastructure expansion, though SpaceX has not been named as a participant in that program.

The market reaction to SpaceX shares has been mixed since its June debut. The stock has declined 12% year-to-date, while Nvidia shares have gained 20% over the same period. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits remained in “extremely bullish” territory for SpaceX, with traders citing the deepening Nvidia partnership as a key factor in their positioning.

For Nvidia, the SpaceX stake represents a strategic foothold in one of the world’s most ambitious AI infrastructure builders. The investment’s value fluctuation underscores the volatility inherent in newly public companies, but the broader relationship signals that Nvidia views SpaceX as more than a financial holding.