# CoreWeave's Stock Sank 15% on Debt Fears. One Investor Says Its $52 Billion in Obligations Is Backed by Microsoft and OpenAI

> As bond-market worries hit CoreWeave shares, Neostellar Capital's Evan Schlossman argues the AI cloud provider's take-or-pay contracts with blue-chip customers make its debt load safer than it looks.

- Source: Money Standard
- Canonical URL: https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/coreweave-neocloud-debt-investor-defense
- Author: Money Standard Newsroom
- Section: Markets
- Published: 2026-10-16T22:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T22:30:00.000Z
- Tags: AI, Debt Markets

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CoreWeave, one of the AI infrastructure companies known as "neoclouds" for renting out GPU computing capacity to AI firms, saw its stock drop more than 15% on October 16 as bond-market concerns about its debt load resurfaced. The company went public in March 2025.

Evan Schlossman, a principal at Neostellar Capital Corp, pushed back on the selloff. His firm bought a $25 million stake in CoreWeave in 2024 and sold 40% of it for a $15 million gain in the second quarter of 2025, giving it a direct stake in how the debt story plays out. Schlossman argued the company can comfortably service its obligations because its revenue comes from noncancelable "take-or-pay" contracts with what he described as "extremely high-credit-worthy customers."

The numbers behind the debate are large on both sides of the ledger. In the first half of 2026, CoreWeave reported $4.6 billion in revenue against $16.3 billion in operating lease liabilities and $35.6 billion in total debt, putting combined debt and lease commitments around $52 billion; the company posted a $1.4 billion net loss over the same period. Its remaining performance obligations stand at $103.7 billion, with 41% of that due by 2028. Microsoft and OpenAI are among its largest customers, its top three customers accounted for 72% of second-quarter revenue, and 98% of revenue came from committed contracts, the piece of the business Schlossman points to as his main justification for confidence.

Skeptics see the same concentration differently. Gartner has estimated that 80% of neocloud providers will stop operating independently by 2030, and CoreWeave's bond yields have climbed as high as 15%, a sign that debt investors are demanding a steep risk premium. Accountant Francine McKenna offered a blunter version of the concern, warning that "Microsoft is ruthless, and will eat CoreWeave for lunch," a nod to the leverage a handful of giant customers can hold over a supplier that depends so heavily on them.

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Originally published by Money Standard. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/coreweave-neocloud-debt-investor-defense.