CoreWeave's bonds yield 15% when its model needs about 6%, Newcomer reports

Newcomer's argument comes down to the gap between two interest rates. CoreWeave's bonds yielded 15% as of Thursday ^[1], and Newcomer says the company has to borrow at investment-grade rates, more like 6%, for its math to work ^[16]. That is a gap of 9 percentage points ^[12]. Newcomer did not disclose which bonds carry the 15% yield or what share of CoreWeave's debt they represent.

The rate story is narrower than the framing suggests. Newcomer lists rising interest rates alongside political backlash and general market jitters over the AI trade as the forces bearing on neoclouds ^[17], without a rate level or a split between them. The evidence supports a narrower claim: financing has tightened for the most leveraged names, with rates one of three stated causes. Newcomer's own forecast is blunt: "The betting here is that there's carnage to come." ^[18]

Nvidia's Jensen Huang is the obvious skeptic. According to Newcomer, he said Thursday that CoreWeave's cost of capital was declining and all would be fine ^[15]. A cost of capital can fall on a blended basis while one bond trades at 15%, but Newcomer did not say which measure Huang meant or put a number on it. CEO Mike Intrator, for his part, pleaded "irrational markets" in explaining the bond selloff ^[4]. Equity holders have been calmer: shares are down 30% in recent weeks but still 60% above the IPO price ^[3], and Bloomberg found that the founders have sold $3.3 billion of stock since the IPO ^[5].

Firmus is the cleaner test case because the market has already ruled on it. It had delivered 46MW of a 912MW pipeline ^[7], about 5% ^[13], and sought a $30 billion valuation on $59 million of revenue ^[6][7], roughly 500 times FY2026 sales ^[14]. Investors would not back the deal even at a lower price ^[6]. The company says it still plans a New York listing next year and will raise private funds in the meantime, with no announcement yet ^[8].

Nscale is the next one in the queue. It filed last month at a $35 billion valuation resting on Microsoft and Anthropic contracts, with a large ratio of promised to online megawatts ^[9]. Both companies were built on debt backed by Nvidia and by private credit lenders such as Apollo and Blackstone ^[10]. We think the quarter's decision belongs to those lenders: whether to keep funding projects at private-market terms while public investors decline to. The consequence lands next quarter, when Firmus has to show what a private round costs.

Newcomer's evidence on Anthropic is mixed for the same reason. Anthropic disclosed nearly $17 billion of third-quarter revenue, up 46% from the prior quarter, against about 100% growth between the first and second quarters ^[11]. Growth is still fast, but it is slowing, and Nscale's valuation leans on Anthropic as a customer.

For anyone budgeting compute, Newcomer does not address pricing or whether capacity will arrive late. The checkable number is delivered capacity against promised capacity, and Firmus shows how wide that ratio can be.