Markets NVDA -0.33% AUG 10, 2026

Musk pledges SpaceX AI buildout 'exclusively' to Nvidia ahead of Aug. 26 print

NVDA rallied 4%+ Wednesday after Musk endorsed the Vera Rubin architecture on SpaceX's first public earnings call, days before Nvidia's Q2 FY2027 report.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Nvidia shares rose more than 4% Wednesday after Elon Musk, speaking on SpaceX’s first-ever public earnings call, committed the company’s AI buildout to a single silicon vendor. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer. So we’re exclusive to Nvidia.” The endorsement carried the S&P 500 up 0.6% by 9:39 a.m. in New York, on track for a second consecutive record close. SpaceX’s own stock fell more than 10% before recovering off the lows, the classic split-screen of an announcement that flatters the supplier and worries the buyer.

The scale figures Musk disclosed explain both reactions. SpaceX expects to exit 2026 with more than 2 gigawatts of compute and reach close to 10 gigawatts by year-end 2027. That’s a customer capable of absorbing an unusually large slice of Nvidia GPU output for years, and a capex commitment that arrives in the middle of what Forbes has called the “capex vigilante” moment, where investors punished Meta last week despite an earnings beat.

The timing is the point. Nvidia reports Q2 FY2027 on Aug. 26, three weeks out. In May the company guided to roughly $91 billion in Q2 revenue at a 75% gross margin, excluding any China Data Center compute contribution. Q1 had already printed at a record $81.6 billion, up 85% year-over-year, with Data Center revenue of $75.2 billion, up 92%. Alongside that print, the board authorized an additional $80 billion in share repurchases and raised the quarterly dividend to $0.25 from $0.01. Capital return at that magnitude only makes sense if management believes the demand curve keeps bending upward.

A SpaceX SEC filing cited by TechRepublic filled in the customer side of the same equation: a Google agreement covering roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs at up to $920 million per month as capacity ramps, and an Anthropic agreement for roughly 325,000 GPUs at up to $1.25 billion per month. SpaceX isn’t just a buyer of Nvidia silicon; it’s becoming a compute landlord whose two largest disclosed tenants are themselves Nvidia’s most watched demand signals.

With 86% of reporting S&P 500 companies beating consensus per FactSet, the Aug. 26 print now functions as the market’s verdict on whether the AI capex cycle is still legible as growth or has already been reclassified as risk.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.