CoreWeave owed about $35.6 billion in debt at the end of June 2026. Roughly half is secured against specific assets, mainly the GPUs and the customer contracts behind them. The other half is unsecured. Those unsecured notes have been trading at prices that push the yield up to around 15%, levels more often associated with distressed credit. The secured facilities have stayed quieter. That gap is now the clearest signal in the capital structure, and it is worth closer scrutiny.
The rating agencies still have CoreWeave in the single-B to low-double-B range: Moody’s at Ba3, S&P at B+, and Fitch at BB-. That is well above distressed territory. The secondary market is pricing the unsecured notes closer to distressed levels.
Who holds the secured debt
Most of the secured debt is in private credit facilities. These loans are backed by GPUs, other equipment, or particular customer contracts, and they do not trade in the same way the public bonds do. They are held by private-credit managers and by the investors in those funds.
The bigger ones include a $2.3 billion deal in 2023 led by Magnetar and Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, a $7.5 billion facility in 2024 that again brought in Blackstone and Magnetar, and an $8.5 billion facility in March 2026 that was closed by Blackstone Credit & Insurance. Later deals, including a $3.1 billion and a $2.6 billion delayed-draw term loan, followed the same pattern. Private-credit firms and banks arranged them, and the loans are secured on the hardware and the contracted cash flows.
Because the loans are tied to specific assets and contracts, and because a lot of them sit inside private-credit vehicles rather than open-ended high-yield funds, they have held up better than the unsecured bonds. They also tend to carry lower interest rates.
This is the same private-credit channel we have written about before in the context of AI data-centre financing. Carlyle has estimated that private credit could end up financing something like $1 trillion of the AI compute build-out. CoreWeave is one of the largest single borrowers in that channel, and most of the private-credit exposure is sitting in secured facilities like these.
Who holds the unsecured debt
The unsecured piece is mainly the senior notes and the convertible notes. The senior notes (about $10 billion at the end of June) are the ones that have been trading at yields around 15%. The convertibles add several billion more and they are also unsecured.
These notes are held mostly by traditional high-yield and multi-sector bond managers, not by the private-credit firms that dominate the secured side. Janus Henderson’s John Lloyd has said that his firm’s Multi-Sector Income Fund holds the 9.75% notes due 2031. The 9.75% coupon is what CoreWeave pays; because the notes have fallen in price, the yield a new buyer earns is now closer to 16%. Lloyd called the recent sell-off “a little bit of overreacting” and pointed to the size of CoreWeave’s contracted backlog.
Because the notes are unsecured, the holders only get paid from whatever is left after the secured lenders take their share. That is a large risk exposure in case something goes wrong. On top of that, the bonds can be sold in the secondary market by any of the funds that own them, so prices can move more quickly. The convertibles are in a similar spot: they are unsecured debt that can turn into equity, so they are also behind the secured lenders in a downside scenario.
CoreWeave’s CEO, Michael Intrator, has pushed back. In an internal memo he said the company’s backlog “more than supports” its debt obligations and that “when you are building a new type of technology company, there will be periods of time when the market misunderstands and acts irrationally.” The company has pointed to a contracted backlog of roughly $104 billion as the main offset to the debt.
Why the pricing gap matters
CoreWeave still needs a lot of additional capital to keep building data centres. How easily it can keep raising money in both the private-credit market and the public bond market will decide whether the current pricing holds or gets wider. If broader stress starts to show up in AI data-centre financing, as we looked at in our earlier piece on whether it could become a systemic risk, the unsecured notes of the largest borrowers are the most liquid place it is likely to appear first. CoreWeave’s bonds are currently the clearest example of that, even as the company and at least one public holder say the market has gone too far.
Author: Andy Samu
See Also:
Carlyle Warns Private Credit on AI Lending Concentration
Could AI Data Centre Financing Become a Systemic Risk? | Disruption Banking
Andrew Samu
Andrew Samu, Editor-at-Large at Disruption Banking, shapes the publication’s global coverage of banking, capital markets and digital assets. Based at London’s Level39, he combines market analysis with a strong commercial perspective, informed in part by his role as Commercial Director at Verita HR.
