CoreWeave’s rise from a scrappy GPU broker to a Silicon Valley darling has been powered not by steady profits but by a breathtaking $29 billion borrowing spree that turned CEO Michael Intrator into a multi‑billionaire seemingly overnight. That debt-fueled sprint looks like success on paper, but any honest patriot has to ask: when the music stops who pays the piper?
What started as a crypto‑mining pivot has grown into an empire of roughly 250,000 GPUs across more than 30 data centers, and the company hauled in nearly $2 billion in revenue last year even as losses ballooned. Growth is impressive, and American grit deserves credit, but those revenue numbers come with headline losses that investors and taxpayers should not ignore.
CoreWeave didn’t stumble into this position by accident — it engineered a financing model that leans on secured debt, leases, and massive private credit facilities, including a marquee $7.5 billion package led by Blackstone and Magnetar, and a string of follow‑on debt offerings. That creative financing let the company scale fast, but it also wrapped the firm in a web of obligations backed largely by the very GPUs it needs to run, making the whole operation fragile to any slowdown.
At the same time, CoreWeave has locked in blockbuster customer deals that read like a who’s who of the AI cartel — expanded contracts with OpenAI and Nvidia and a freshly reported agreement with Meta worth billions more through the end of the decade. Those contracts give the company clout, but they also expose an alarming concentration and a circularity where vendors, customers, and financiers are all playing both sides of the table.
Conservatives should cheer American innovation, yet we must also call out reckless financial engineering when we see it. The same press that hails every overnight paper billionaire is also warning about a bubble and the “circular” financing that makes today’s gains look suspiciously like yesterday’s telecom excesses. Markets need discipline, not another wave of easy credit propped up by hype and hope.
Worse still, the company’s rapid expansion has exposed administrative weaknesses and covenant frictions as it tried to take U.S.‑only collateral into Europe, and it faces hefty near‑term debt maturities and high‑cost borrowings that could squeeze cash flow if anything in the AI craze cools. Wall Street’s willingness to hand out 9% unsecured notes and other high‑yield paper doesn’t make the risk vanish — it just transfers it, possibly to ordinary investors and, in systemic stress, to the broader economy.
This isn’t a plea to stop progress; it’s a call to stop pretending that every privately engineered skyscraper of debt is a sure thing for Main Street. Lawmakers and regulators should not mortgage American stability to underwrite a private financing trend, and investors should demand transparency and accountability before they ride the next AI wave. Hardworking Americans built this country on prudence and enterprise — we can celebrate innovation without applauding a gamble that could leave ordinary families holding the bill.
