Nvidia posted another blowout quarter, but the number turning heads inside the report wasn’t the headline figure. It was how much of that growth is now tied to a single, increasingly inseparable partner: SpaceX.
Nvidia reported fiscal second quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, with Data Center sales reaching $89.0 billion, up 117%. Strong as those numbers are, the more interesting story sits in the guidance and buildout plans layered underneath them, specifically the expanding role SpaceX now plays in Nvidia’s roadmap.
On the earnings call, CFO Colette Kress confirmed that Nvidia’s next-generation Vera CPU is already shipping to its earliest customers, with SpaceX’s AI unit, SpaceXAI, among the first in line. Kress said Nvidia expects Vera to be deployed across every major hyperscaler, neocloud, AI lab, and system OEM, with shipments already underway to lead partners including Oracle, SpaceXAI, and, starting this quarter, Amazon.
Nvidia does not disclose customer-level revenue, so SpaceX’s exact contribution has to be estimated from outside analysis. Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster estimated on social media that SpaceX now accounts for roughly 5% of Nvidia’s overall revenue, up from around 3% last quarter. He noted that Nvidia appears to have reclassified SpaceX’s revenue out of its AI, Clouds, Industrials, and Enterprise category and into its Hyperscaler category, a shift he attributed to SpaceX’s plan to bring 8 gigawatts of compute capacity online next year, putting it in the same tier as Meta and Amazon. Applied to Nvidia’s $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, that 5% estimate works out to nearly $5 billion tied to SpaceX. It’s worth noting this figure is an outside analyst’s estimate, not a number Nvidia itself has confirmed.
The relationship goes beyond chip orders. Nvidia also highlighted that SpaceXAI will adopt its Vera CPU to power the agentic AI workloads behind Grok, xAI’s chatbot, handling code execution and data processing so that Nvidia’s GPUs can stay focused on core AI compute. SpaceXAI president Mike Nicolls said Vera gives the company the CPU performance and memory bandwidth needed to manage that orchestration and data load at scale.
Perhaps the most striking development is where some of this hardware is headed next. Earlier this week, the two companies confirmed plans for a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system, designed to launch aboard SpaceX’s first-generation Starmind satellite in the fourth quarter of 2027, with a larger-scale version planned for 2028. The satellite’s AI1 design carries a 120-kilowatt compute payload, peaking at 150 kilowatts, effectively taking Nvidia’s data center hardware into orbit.
Taken together, the picture is one of two companies becoming increasingly dependent on each other in different directions. For Nvidia, SpaceX has become both a major terrestrial customer and the delivery vehicle for putting its chips in space. For SpaceX, Nvidia’s hardware is becoming the computing backbone behind its AI ambitions, from Earth-based data centers to orbital compute payloads.
