Google will pay SpaceX $920 million a month to rent artificial-intelligence compute capacity at Elon Musk's data centers, according to a regulatory filing disclosed Friday, days before SpaceX is set to price the largest stock-market listing on record.
The four-year agreement runs from October through June 2029 and gives Google access to about 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units inside SpaceX facilities built originally for Musk's xAI workloads. It is the most concrete sign yet that the AI buildout is reordering who owns the picks and shovels of the boom.
What Google bought
Capacity ramps up at a reduced fee through September before the full monthly rate begins, the filing said. If SpaceX fails to "deliver access to the committed amount of GPUs by September 30, 2026," Google can terminate immediately or accept the partial capacity at a lower price after a one-month grace period. Either side can walk away on 90 days' notice after this year.
A Google Cloud spokesperson told CNBC the company struck the deal "to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected."
It is the second large infrastructure contract SpaceX has booked since its February merger with xAI, which valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. Anthropic last month agreed to take all of SpaceX's compute at its Colossus 1 facility in Memphis.
Alphabet's cash hunt
The disclosure comes as Alphabet pursues $85 billion in equity, including a $10 billion private placement by Berkshire Hathaway, to fund AI capital expenditures it raised in April to as much as $190 billion for the year. Alphabet shares just finished a fourth straight weekly drop, the longest losing streak in more than a year.
"I never thought Google would need to hit the public markets to raise money to fund their spending," Dan Niles of Niles Investment Management said, calling Alphabet "the best stack in all of AI." Melius Research estimates the company's free cash flow will turn negative for the next few years.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive David Solomon, whose firm is working on the offering, told CNBC the sale will be the "first actual concrete data point" for a wave of mega-IPOs led by SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. "We are definitely in a moment where there's more greed than there is fear," Solomon said.
Washington at the table
The scramble reached the White House on Friday, when CNBC confirmed that OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and the Trump administration are in talks about a federal stake in the AI company. Under one scenario, OpenAI would donate equity to seed a public wealth fund, an idea Altman first floated in 2025.
"There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner," President Trump told reporters on Air Force One. The administration has already taken positions in Intel, IBM and other quantum and critical-mineral firms during Trump's second term.
Caveat
Friday's reporting on all three threads came entirely from CNBC; no critics of the Google-SpaceX disclosure were reached for comment by press time.
SpaceX is scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq on June 12 at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Google's monthly payments start the month after.