CoreWeave Sells $3.55 Billion in Junk Bonds, Including First-Ever Euro Debt From a US AI Firm

CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWV) just did something no other US artificial intelligence company has done. It sold euro-denominated junk bonds, raising €2 billion, or roughly $2.3 billion, alongside $1.25 billion in dollar-denominated notes. Total haul: about $3.55 billion.

JPMorgan Chase led the deal. The six-year euro notes carry an 8.5% yield. The dollar bonds pay even more, 9.625%, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by the source reporting. Those are not investment-grade numbers. They're junk-bond numbers, because CoreWeave is a junk-rated company.

Moody's Ratings has CoreWeave at Ba3. S&P Global Ratings has it at B+. Fitch Ratings puts it at BB-. All three are below investment grade. Compare that to Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which have raised a combined $77 billion in non-dollar bond markets since the start of 2025, at investment-grade rates, because they're investment-grade companies.

CoreWeave isn't. It's a nine-year-old crypto miner turned Nvidia GPU landlord that now runs nearly 50 data centers across North America and Europe, leasing computing power by the hour to Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI. Nvidia Corp. itself is one of CoreWeave's largest shareholders, which tells you how tightly wound this whole arrangement is.

Why Investors Still Showed Up

Demand for the euro bonds topped €7 billion, more than three times what CoreWeave actually sold. That's real money from real institutional buyers chasing yield.

Hashem Shubber, JPMorgan's managing director of leveraged finance capital markets, said European investors have been hunting for AI exposure and haven't had many chances to get it at this scale. That's a fair point. If you're a European high-yield fund manager and you want in on the AI infrastructure boom, your options are limited. CoreWeave just gave you one.

The strongest case for skepticism here is that a company burning cash this fast at these interest rates is walking a tightrope. But sophisticated bond buyers with their own money on the line oversubscribed the deal nearly 4-to-1. Investors aren't naive. They looked at the balance sheet and the risk, and they still wrote the checks.

The Cash Burn Is Real

CoreWeave is expected to spend almost $35 billion in capital investment this year and burn through nearly $26 billion in cash, according to the average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Those are estimates, not final numbers, but they're staggering regardless.

This isn't CoreWeave's first rodeo with debt. Before this euro-dollar deal, the company had already issued $6.5 billion in junk-rated dollar bonds since its first sale in May 2025. Add another $6.6 billion in convertible notes and a $3.1 billion leveraged loan backed by customer contracts for microchips, and CoreWeave has built a genuinely enormous debt stack in about 14 months.

The market is pricing in real risk. The cost of insuring CoreWeave's debt against default for five years runs about 3.5 percentage points higher than the same insurance for Oracle Corp., a much larger, more established company. That gap is the market telling you CoreWeave is a riskier bet, plain and simple.

Ripple Effects Beyond CoreWeave

This debt binge isn't happening in isolation. CoreWeave has become the anchor tenant that other companies point to when they go raise their own junk debt. Applied Digital Corp. raised $1.59 billion this week specifically to build more computing capacity for CoreWeave in North Dakota.

That means CoreWeave's financial health is now load-bearing for other companies' balance sheets too. If CoreWeave's cash burn outpaces its revenue growth, the fallout wouldn't stay contained to one stock.

No credit rating agency has downgraded CoreWeave. No regulator has flagged the debt structure as unsound. This is a company using leverage aggressively to fund an infrastructure race, and investors, so far, are betting the payoff justifies the interest rate. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether AI compute demand keeps growing fast enough to service 9.625%-plus debt for the next six years.