Same chips, different balance sheets: CoreWeave, Nebius and the neocloud debt test

The setup

The industry calls them “neoclouds”: the GPU landlords of the AI boom: they buy Nvidia systems, find power and buildings, and rent the compute to AI labs and hyperscalers. Two public names anchor the group. CoreWeave (CRWV) is the biggest and most indebted. Nebius (NBIS), the Amsterdam-based spin-out of Yandex's international assets, sells much the same service. As DA Davidson's Gil Luria put it to CNBC last week, the two “literally sell the same thing to the same companies,” but Nebius has “almost no financial leverage.”⁵

That difference has never mattered more. Since Oct 14, a sell-off in CoreWeave's bonds has spread to its shares and to every company that looks like it. On Oct 15 the 2032 notes yielded 15.77%, and five-year credit default swaps were quoted at 1,140 basis points, or 11.4% a year to insure the debt.⁵ Over one year CRWV is down 54% and NBIS is up 61% (Figure 2), even though both posted triple-digit revenue growth last quarter.^1,2,16

Two ways to fund the same boom

CoreWeave borrows against its contracts. Its June 30 debt stack runs from delayed-draw term loans secured by GPUs (at effective rates of 7% to 15%) to $10B of high-yield senior notes at 9–10%, $6.6B of 2% convertibles and $5.1B of vendor (OEM) financing. Of $35.6B in principal, $4.4B comes due in the rest of 2026 and $6.2B in 2027.³ Interest expense more than doubled from a year earlier to $640M in Q2, and the company guided to $860–940M for Q3.^1,6 Operating cash flow in the first half was $3.7B, against $14.1B spent on property and equipment.¹

Nebius funds itself more like a growth stock. It has issued about $8.5B of convertible notes (the March 2026 tranche carries 1.25% and 2.625% coupons), sold $2.8B of stock through its at-the-market program at an average of $223.60, and sold Nvidia $2B of pre-funded warrants.^4,2 It also leans on customers: about 70% of Q2 deals included prepayments covering 50–60% of the related capex, and it expects more than $9B of prepayments in 2026. Its first secured GPU loan, $775M in July, priced at SOFR + 2.50%.²

“They literally sell the same thing to the same companies and have almost no financial leverage.”Gil Luria, DA Davidson, on Nebius vs CoreWeave, to CNBC⁵

There is a catch in the tidy comparison. On gross debt to annualized Q2 adjusted EBITDA, Nebius (about 9x) is actually higher than CoreWeave (about 5.9x), because Nebius's earnings are still small. Its advantage is net debt: roughly $0.5B versus about $30B (SURVYR. calculations from filings).^1,3,4 Nebius pays for that cushion with dilution; CoreWeave pays for its growth with interest.

The rest of the neocloud map

The same financing playbook (GPU-backed loans, take-or-pay contracts, a big-tech customer) now runs across the group, and the terms show how lenders rank the risk.

Peer table · how the neoclouds borrow

Company	Key financing	Contracts
IREN (IREN)	$3.6B GPU financing for the Microsoft deal at ~6%; $2.4B at 9% fixed for other customers (Aug 2026)11	$9.7B, 5-yr Microsoft contract; $4B contracted ARR11
Applied Digital (APLD)	$2.35B of 9.25% secured notes due 203012	400 MW campus for CoreWeave; ~15-yr, 200 MW hyperscaler lease (~$5B)12
TeraWulf (WULF)	$3.2B of 7.75% secured notes due 2030; Google warrants pledged (Oct 2025)13	Fluidstack leases at Lake Mariner13
Lambda (private)	$926M term loan B at SOFR + 3.00%, rated Baa2 (Aug 2026)14	Investment-grade customer deployment14
Nscale (private)	$1.4B GPU DDTL (Feb 2026); ~$3B investment-grade DDTLs (reported, Sept 2026)15	Executed contracts (unnamed)15
Crusoe (private)	~$509M SPV GPU loan in pre-marketing (reported)14b	Jane Street as offtaker (reported)14b
Oracle (ORCL)	BBB− at S&P; 5-yr CDS ~295 bp (Oct 19)19	$300B OpenAI contract (reported)19

Private-company figures are as reported by the company or trade press and are not audited.

The pattern is consistent: debt tied to an investment-grade customer prices near 6% (IREN's Microsoft deal) or SOFR + 2–3% (Nebius, Lambda), while debt backed by smaller AI labs costs 9% or more. CoreWeave's most recent unsecured notes carry 9.6–9.75% coupons, and they now trade near 15%.^3,5,11 Oracle matters as the investment-grade version of the same bet: S&P cut it to BBB−, one notch above junk, in July.¹⁹

SpaceX: the new giant in the room

SpaceX (SPCX) reported third-quarter results after the close on Tuesday, Oct 20, and the stock moved on them Wednesday.^20,21 The numbers belong in a neocloud story. Its AI segment, which SpaceX calls Super Intelligence after buying xAI, brought in $7.56B, nine times a year earlier. It is now SpaceX's largest business, and part of that revenue comes from renting capacity to Google, Anthropic and others.^20,21 Nameplate compute reached 1.7 GW at Sept 30, up from 0.6 GW a year earlier, as the Colossus II build continued. That already exceeds CoreWeave's 1.5 GW of active power at June 30.^20,1

SpaceX spent $48.1B on property and equipment in the first nine months of 2026, and it guided to $33–37B of revenue in Q1 2027.^20,21 Two links to the neoclouds follow. First, competition: a vertically integrated player with $51.3B of cash and $38.6B of marketable securities is now selling compute to the same AI labs.²⁰ Second, capital: The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct 7 that SpaceX, Oracle and Broadcom were each seeking very large debt deals to pay for AI chips.²² The release does not discuss orbital or Starlink-based data centers, so we leave that idea out. SPCX fell 9.1% today with the rest of the group.¹⁶

Power: the bottleneck that cuts both ways

GPUs are not the scarce input. Nvidia sold $89.0B of data-center hardware last quarter, and $40.3B of that went to AI clouds, industrial and enterprise buyers, up 138%.¹⁷ The scarce input is electricity. Goldman Sachs expects global data-center power demand to rise 170% from 2025 to 2030. It counts roughly 2,600 GW of projects in the U.S. interconnection queue, with a median wait of about five years.¹⁸ The EIA expects U.S. power use to hit records of 4,288 billion kWh in 2026 and 4,356 billion kWh in 2027, led by commercial customers, where most data centers are counted.²³ For self-built power, GE Vernova's gas-turbine backlog plus reservations reached 116 GW at June 30, against roughly 20 GW a year of output.²⁴

For the neoclouds, scarcity is the bull case. Nebius says its one-to-three-year deals now price at $20–25M per megawatt, with upfront payments covering 50–60% of the capex, and that “we could sell today our entire 2027 capacity on these terms if we wanted to.”⁷ Locked-in power is a real asset: CoreWeave has about 3.7 GW contracted and Nebius targets 5 GW by year-end.^1,2

Scarcity is also the bear case. CoreWeave had 1.5 GW of active power at June 30 against about 3.7 GW contracted, and it targets more than 1.85 GW by year-end. Everything in between still has to be built, energized and delivered on time.^1,6 If a site waits on a substation while the GPUs inside it age, interest keeps accruing on hardware that isn't earning yet.

Bull vs. bear

Companies in this story · Oct 22 close

CRWV

CoreWeave

−10.06%

NBIS

Nebius

−7.23%

SPCX

SpaceX

−9.14%

NVDA

Nvidia

−4.40%

ORCL

Oracle

−2.78%

IREN

IREN

−8.37%

APLD

Applied Digital

−9.01%

WULF

TeraWulf

−11.29%

Day change at the Oct 22, 2026 close. Source: Webull.

Bottom line

CoreWeave and Nebius are the same bet on AI compute, financed in opposite ways. CoreWeave's bet is that $104B of signed contracts, Nvidia's backstop and 59% margins will carry $35.6B of debt through a period of 15% bond yields. Nebius's bet is that a cash buffer and customer prepayments keep it out of the credit market's line of fire, at the cost of dilution and a thinner earnings base. Power scarcity supports pricing for both today. If demand cools or projects slip, lenders will quickly find out which assumptions about GPU life and contract renewals were too generous. The next three weeks of earnings and credit spreads should show which story the market believes.