How CoreWeave’s Debt Binge Brought a Perilous Moment of Reckoning

In early 2023, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman gathered with Jas Khaira, the company’s lead AI investor, and other top executives at the finance giant’s Park Avenue headquarters in Manhattan for a debate: Should they give billions of dollars to a little-known data center developer—CoreWeave—that they had turned down just a few months earlier?

CoreWeave had gotten Blackstone to return to the table after landing a multiyear, multibillion-dollar contract to sell cloud computing services to Microsoft. It needed $2.3 billion to buy Nvidia GPUs and secure a data center to house them.

In Blackstone’s discussion of the deal, several executives in the room had deep misgivings, according to a person who attended the meeting. CoreWeave was still something of a mystery, a six-year-old, privately held firm that had generated only $16 million in revenue in the previous year. Schwarzman himself was personally worried his investment team could be making a mistake, the person said.

Still, Schwarzman signed off, and Blackstone went ahead with the deal anyway. Its confidence in making the loan was rooted in the fact that the debt was structured largely on Microsoft’s ability to keep paying CoreWeave. Besides, Blackstone was eager to get in on the action of the AI boom.

These days, CoreWeave is a publicly traded outfit worth $35 billion, holding cloud computing contracts with Microsoft, Meta Platforms, OpenAI and other customers that added up to $5.1 billion in revenue last year. But lately, many people have been asking themselves the same question the Blackstone suits pondered—whether investing in CoreWeave was actually a big fat mistake.

With a business built on mounds of debt, CoreWeave stands today at a moment of reckoning that is reigniting concerns about the stability of the AI economy. Investors in the company have been heading for the exits. Those fears have seeped into other stocks, too, and have prompted anxious discussions across Silicon Valley and Wall Street about whether October 2026 could possibly end up resembling March 2000—the moment when the dot-com bubble burst.

In the last week, the company’s stock has sharply declined—from nearly $80 a share last Tuesday to just over $61 on Monday—a roughly 20% drop that far outpaced the broader market’s decline of less than 1%. CoreWeave belongs to a group of young companies called neoclouds that offer cloud computing services competing with those of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Shares of Nebius and IREN, two other publicly traded neoclouds, have respectively lost 15% and 17% in a week.

CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator acknowledged the whipsaw in a staff memo last week. “When you are building a new type of technology company, there will be periods of time when the market misunderstands and acts irrationally,” he wrote. “We are confident in our disciplined execution.”

The plunge in CoreWeave shares seems to come from an array of factors. There wasn’t any single disastrous announcement by CoreWeave in the last few days that shook confidence. But benchmark U.S. bond yields have been increasing, which means CoreWeave will almost certainly need to pay more for the financing it needs to keep growing. And last Wednesday, the latest U.S. inflation data showed a spike in prices in September, increasing the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, which would further increase borrowing costs.

At the same time, the yields on CoreWeave’s existing debt have spiked, climbing to more than 15% last week, a signal that investors were growing increasingly nervous about the company’s ability to repay its debts. Meanwhile, its CEO has sold CoreWeave stock every week between April and the end of September, securities filings show, while his fellow co-founders have also been selling regularly. While those sales were prescheduled, investors often see such transactions as signals that they, too, should sell.

Trying to decipher what’s going on with CoreWeave—and what will happen next—has become a favorite water-cooler topic in Silicon Valley. Last week, for instance, Elon Musk retweeted a chart showing CoreWeave’s rising bond yields with a single word: “Yikes.” And when venture capitalist Ben Horowitz made a Thursday appearance on the “All-In” podcast, he described CoreWeave’s business as a “Rube Goldberg financial machine” and said his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has largely stayed away from investing in companies like CoreWeave because of their debt-heavy strategies. (Andreessen Horowitz does own a stake in Volta, a newly created neocloud formed by former Brookfield infrastructure investors.)

When asked to comment for this story, CoreWeave declined to make any executives available for interviews. Instead, a spokesperson sent a three-page document titled “Financing Overview October 2026” that outlined its debt maneuvers and how it plans to repay its obligations. The document ends with an attempt at succinct optimism: “CoreWeave is well-positioned to help shape [its] market as it grows and evolves.”

With cloud computing and data centers at the heart of the AI era, CoreWeave’s ability to keep going is seen as an important bellwether for the entire AI industry, an outsize position for a firm that remains little known—and little understood—beyond Wall Street and Silicon Valley insiders. Worries about whether CoreWeave may stumble amid rising borrowing costs then lead to broader concerns about what dominoes may fall next.

Other storm clouds have gathered over the landscape. Last weekend, Microsoft said it would pull out of a compute deal with London-based Nscale over power issues that threaten to delay a 50-megawatt data center in rural Britain. And a week earlier, Firmus, an Australian data center operator backed by Nvidia and Blackstone, pulled its IPO.

A day before Firmus yanked its public offering, one CoreWeave executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the company had not authorized him to speak publicly, argued that CoreWeave investors shouldn’t see that as a warning sign for CoreWeave. He sought to differentiate CoreWeave from Firmus by highlighting the former’s deeper stockpile of long-term contracts, which he says isn’t the same for Firmus. “They have some contracts—and some potential,” the executive said.

Jerry Tang, CEO of AIB Data Centers, a small data center developer, has been biting his nails while watching CoreWeave’s declining stock price. “This is a classic liquidity crunch,” said Tang, whose firm just signed a contract with Nebius to provide 50 MW of data center capacity. “I am very concerned, because this affects everybody,” including his new partner, he added.

Short of Compute

CoreWeave got its start when a group of hedge fund commodities traders decided to get into crypto mining. They set up in a New Jersey office in 2017, starting with one and later expanding to many Nvidia GPUs, which are essential for running the computations involved in crypto mining. A crash in cryptocurrency prices the following year convinced them to use their pile of chips for something else. They pivoted toward high-performance cloud computing, renaming their company from Atlantic Crypto to CoreWeave along the way.

As CoreWeave turned its attention to the cloud, it saw debt as a way to supercharge its growth. Then as now, one form of debt it favored allowed it to raise money for specific data center projects anchored by large customers—like Microsoft.

Following ChatGPT’s late 2022 launch, Microsoft quickly found itself short of compute after promising OpenAI that it would provide the computing power for the company’s nascent models.

In February 2023, CoreWeave signed its compute deal with Microsoft. Two months later, Nvidia joined a $221 million round of financing for CoreWeave, throwing its support behind a competitor to the traditional cloud giants—Amazon, Google and Microsoft—as part of a bid to diversify its reliance on the firms that buy its chips.

By the time CoreWeave got the loan from Blackstone in August of that year, the two firms had come up with an innovative financial maneuver, backing the $2.3 billion with AI chips as collateral. That provided a template for CoreWeave’s future borrowing.

For each data center project, CoreWeave secures a contract with a customer. It then uses that agreement to line up financing, structuring the loans to pay down the debt with the revenue earned from the contract.

The company has said it should take two and a half years to repay such a loan as it continues collecting payouts through the entire life of the contract.

To fund its operations, CoreWeave borrows additional debt that isn’t tied to its contracts and must be repaid out of the corporate coffers. It uses some of those funds, according to analysts, to pay for costs that aren’t covered by the project loans. That means the company is piling debt on top of debt.

Armed with Blackstone’s money, CoreWeave continued working closely with Microsoft, adding other customers like Meta Platforms and OpenAI along the way. In March 2025, CoreWeave sold shares to the public at $40 a share, then the largest AI-related listing ever. The stock surged beyond $183 in the months after.

In July, CoreWeave became the first company to deploy Nvidia’s most advanced server rack, and this January, the chipmaker invested another $2 billion in the company. As CoreWeave grew, it continued using the loan structure it designed with Blackstone to fund its expansion.

As one of the few companies that actually trades in the public markets, CoreWeave has also become a proxy for the broader AI trade.

Many investors who have long exposure to private tech companies such as the leading frontier labs have turned to CoreWeave as a way to hedge other investments, according to one adviser who speaks with numerous large investors. To hedge, they can short the stock. They can also buy credit default swaps, which offer a payout if the company defaults on its debt.

“If you are taking a negative bet, what better place than in a liquid bet on [credit default swaps] for CoreWeave?” said John McPeake, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, who rates the stock a buy. McPeake said he attended CoreWeave’s customer conference several weeks ago in San Francisco, where the company said it would raise prices an additional 10%, on top of an increase it had already announced, on the main product it sells: GPUs by the hour.

‘We Can’t Figure It Out’

Despite all the recent commotion, CoreWeave still enjoys the support of the industry’s biggest players. In addition to having connections to Blackstone, the private equity firm with the most assets under management, the company also enjoys cozy ties to Nvidia. Last Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he had full confidence in CoreWeave.

“CoreWeave’s strength is improving every day,” he said. “I’m optimistic.”

The comments arrested the slide in the company’s stock price before it picked up again on Friday.

And early backer Blackstone has more recently introduced the company to a new base of investors: insurance companies. CoreWeave finds insurers alluring because they have deep pockets and generally invest with long-term time horizons. Brannin McBee, a CoreWeave founder, acknowledged the importance of the insurance segment last week in an FT interview published just as the company’s bonds were plunging.

Insurance companies, which like to invest in high-yielding investment-grade debt, bought more than $740 million of a project-specific loan CoreWeave had arranged for a Meta contract, according to data compiled by S&P Capital IQ. Blackstone manages investments for some of the largest insurers involved in the deal, including American General Life Insurance, Fidelity & Guaranty Life and Security Life of Denver.

The next thing on the horizon for CoreWeave could be equity sales. Michael Haber, a desk credit strategist at Jefferies, said last week in an interview that he has had a lot of conversations with equity investors who have finally taken notice that higher interest rates and too much supply of AI-related debt are making the credit markets more expensive—and perhaps totally unavailable in the future—for some data center projects and chip purchases. They’re coming to the realization that neoclouds and other developers are going to need to raise money by selling stock.

“A lot of equity investors were not paying attention and are now waking up and saying, ‘Why is the equity down so much?’” he said. “The AI story is moving from being a tech story to a financing story.”

Selling that story to investors could be difficult if stock and bond prices continue to fluctuate without a clear reason why.

Last week, even CoreWeave’s bankers at Goldman Sachs couldn’t explain the swoon in the company’s share price. When Christopher Miglino, CEO of compute provider Axe Compute, sat down with his bankers at Goldman Sachs, they acknowledged that there was no fundamental reason why CoreWeave should have been hammered so hard. Goldman was one of the company’s IPO underwriters.

“I was having breakfast with Goldman Sachs yesterday, and I said, ‘What do you guys think?’” Miglino said. “They said, ‘We can’t figure it out. Fundamentally, there is no rhyme and reason for what’s going on.’”

On Monday, Goldman’s research analysts upgraded CoreWeave’s stock to a buy rating. Such moves can often bring some relief to a battered stock. Even so, CoreWeave shares finished the day down 0.4%.