Nvidia Stock Rises After Elon Musk’s SpaceX Chip Surprise

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has praised Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously and committed to buying Nvidia hardware. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Key Points

• Nvidia shares rose following Elon Musk’s projections for artificial-intelligence chip purchases.
• Elon Musk said xAI’s Memphis data center houses 260,000 Nvidia chips and expects to add 440,000 GB300 Blackwell chips by October.
• The rapid expansion of the Memphis data center could ease concerns about whether tech companies can construct data centers quickly.

Nvidia can always count on Elon Musk. The chip maker got a lift Friday from the billionaire businessman’s projections for how many artificial-intelligence chips he expects to buy for his SpaceX company’s xAI business.

Musk said overnight that the xAI’s Memphis data-center complex, called “Colossus,” already houses around 780,000 Nvidia AI chips, split across its Hopper and Blackwell generations. The company expects another 220,000 of Nvidia’s GB300 Blackwell chips to be operational next week, followed by another 220,000 in October.

“If we get lucky, yet another 220k GB300 by late December,” Musk posted on social-media platform X.

Nvidia shares were up 0.6% at $225.95 in premarket trading Friday.

Musk’s huge chip purchases aren’t exactly news. Colossus was always set to incorporate a minimum of one million graphics-processing units, according to a statement from the city’s chamber of commerce, and Musk previously said SpaceX would exclusively use Nvidia AI chips.

The latest figures indicate Colossus could house as many as 1.44 million chips before the end of the year, spread across the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 facilities. The pace of expansion is impressive. And it could help soothe concerns about whether technology companies are overpromising about their abilities to construct data-centers quickly.

For example, Oracle has run into issues with its “Project Jupiter” data-center campus in New Mexico, leading it to deliver a contractual notice to potentially delay payments to its developer, according to The Wall Street Journal. Oracle said in a statement that the project remains on schedule.

Nvidia needs data-center construction to keep pace with its chip sales in order to avoid a glut of hardware sitting in inventories. Musk is doing his part at least.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8