No, it will delete the blockchain as it downloads. As I said, the entire blockchain will never be on disk at any point in time.

The whole reason the blockchain must be downloaded is because Bitcoin Core is a full node which does not rely on trusting anyone; that is its security model. In order to maintain that, it must verify the entire blockchain, which means that it will have to download all of it, but it does not need to keep it, so it can delete as it downloads.