CoreWeave (CRWV) stock fell 15% on Wednesday, a day after a chart of its rising borrowing costs gained traction on X.
Bloomberg, citing an internal memo, reports that the AI cloud company’s CEO stated in a memo that the market is acting “irrationally.”
“When you are building a new type of technology company, there will be periods of time when the market misunderstands and acts irrationally,” CEO Mike Intrator wrote to staff. “We are confident in our business model, our customers, the extraordinary quality of our execution, and the relentless discipline around the financial engine we have built.”
65.78 -12.03 (-15.46%)
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64.30 -1.48 (-2.25%)
A bond’s yield rises as its price falls, so a yield near 15% means investors want a steep return to lend CoreWeave money.
Intrator added that “factors like the weakness and delays surrounding the attempted IPOs and debt financings” of several CoreWeave rivals “are bleeding into the narrative around CoreWeave.”
On Tuesday, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya posted a chart showing that the yield on $1.25 billion of CoreWeave bonds due in 2032 “touched 15% today, then closed at a new high” of 14.5%.
“Is the AI buildout creating a private credit bubble?” Palihapitiya asked.
Musk, who owns the platform, replied with one word: “Yikes.”
The selling spread to other AI cloud stocks: Nebius (NBIS) fell 11%, Oracle (ORCL) dropped another 9%, and the following stocks sank more than 10%: DigitalOcean (DOCN), Hut 8 (HUT), Cipher (CIFR), TeraWulf (WULF), and IREN (IREN).
CoreWeave rents out Nvidia (NVDA) chips to AI companies and pays for much of that hardware with debt. The company’s interest expense rose to $640 million in the second quarter from $267 million a year earlier, and it lost $626 million in the quarter, according to Yahoo Finance data. Revenue more than doubled over the same stretch to $2.58 billion.
Total debt reached about $52 billion at the end of June, up from about $15 billion a year earlier.
The company is clearly looking for cheaper money. CoreWeave is chasing insurers’ vast pools of capital to fund its build-out, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.
Co-founder Brannin McBee, who leads CoreWeave’s financing, told the FT that investment-grade ratings on more of its chip-backed debt would let it borrow from insurers, whose capital “is unlimited. Like, that’s all the money in the world that sits in the insurance tranche.”
McBee said CoreWeave will keep taking out chip-backed loans: “I don’t look at that as scary debt at all. I look at that as accelerating debt and great debt.”
