coreweave bond yields top 15% as investors question ai debt

Felix Abagnale 19 Oct 2026 2 min read

funding

coreweave's shares lost about a quarter of their value last week, and the yield on its 2031 bond rose above 16%, reuters reports. the gpu cloud provider rents nvidia compute to microsoft, meta and openai. investors now ask what happens to big tech's ai plans if coreweave cannot keep borrowing.

what happened to coreweave's bonds

coreweave bonds sold in june at a yield of 9.675% fell sharply in price, pushing the yield to about 15%. a hot inflation reading raised bets on rate hikes, and heavily indebted ai companies were hit first. reuters ties the selloff to coreweave's roughly $50b of debt.

max frumes of credit data firm 9fin called coreweave "the canary in the coal mine" for ai-linked debt. dan ives of yorkville ives estimates that 5% to 10% of planned ai data center projects will not be built.

on oct 19 the stock rose 2.4% after goldman sachs upgraded it to buy. the 2031 bond yield eased to 15.13%, according to tradeweb data.

coreweave's balance sheet

coreweave's 10-q for the quarter ended june 30 shows how thin the cushion is. the company reported:

$72.0b in total liabilities, up from $46.0b at the end of 2025
$5.5b in cash and $5.0b in shareholders' equity
$2.6b in quarterly revenue
$103.7b in contracted future revenue, its backlog

the backlog is the bull case: customers have signed for years of capacity. the risk is timing, since the data centers must be built and paid for before that revenue arrives.

more ai debt than investors can see

s&p global said on oct 19 that the biggest tech firms likely carry more ai-linked liabilities than they disclose. its digital infrastructure head mark habib pointed to deals where hyperscalers effectively guarantee data center builds or smaller ai companies. s&p sees no need to change ratings for now.

s&p tracks six us hyperscalers: amazon, microsoft, alphabet, oracle, meta and spacex. it expects them to spend more than $7t on ai capex between 2025 and 2030. morgan stanley forecasts total ai investment of $1.6t in 2027 and $1.8t in 2028.