Most people know Nvidia as the company selling the chips that power artificial intelligence.
A filing with the SEC shows it is also one of SpaceX's biggest shareholders.
The stake was worth around $21 billion when the second quarter closed. It comes from 122.8 million shares of SpaceX's Class A stock.
That makes Nvidia the sixth-largest SpaceX shareholder, according to FactSet. The top of that list is full of heavy hitters.
Elon Musk owns the largest position by far, valued at about $850 billion. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is next at roughly $78 billion.
SpaceX went public in June with a record offering, and the stock has been swinging sharply in the two months since. On Friday, Aug. 14, 2026, shares closed at $140 after ending June at $170.86.
That puts Nvidia's current stake at about $17.2 billion. Nvidia put in $5 billion less than a year ago, so the position is still up big.
Among Nvidia's investments, the SpaceX stake is the second largest. Nvidia's largest investment is its Intel position, now about $22 billion, compared with $30 billion when the second quarter ended.
Nvidia did not buy SpaceX stock the usual way. The shares came from a bet on Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.
In January, Nvidia put $10 billion into xAI during a $20 billion funding round, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. The exact terms stayed private.
A month later, in February, SpaceX took over xAI in a transaction that valued xAI at $1.25 trillion. That is how Nvidia's cash turned into SpaceX shares.
The relationship goes deeper than ownership. On a call with analysts about the April-June quarter, Musk said Nvidia chips will be the only ones used in SpaceX's AI data centers and for its frontier AI models, the most advanced kind the company is building.
He called Nvidia's GPUs, the workhorse chips behind AI, the "best architecture" for training, inference, and related services. Inference is the step where a trained AI model uses what it learned to answer questions.
Musk also said SpaceX expects a "significant allocation" of Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs next year. Add it up, and SpaceX is not just a stock on Nvidia's books; it is also a customer.
There is a reason the stock drop matters beyond one number. Bob Sloan of S3 Partners called SpaceX "the frothiest trade ever and bleeds into other sectors."
That kind of speculative excess can look great for a while, but it has a way of disappearing quickly.
His point is that SpaceX is not a one-stock story. When a favorite name turns, investors often rethink other crowded trades at the same time.
For your portfolio, the bigger story is what Nvidia gets from this. It owns a big stake in SpaceX, and it makes the chips Musk says SpaceX wants to build its AI around.
That second role may end up mattering more than the first.
The business story can be strong while the stock story gets messy. SpaceX just showed both sides in the span of two months.