Oct 16 (Reuters) - Private credit's expanding role in financing AI infrastructure faced one of its clearest market tests this week as CoreWeave's bonds fell to distressed levels, raising questions about how lenders are pricing a boom built on chips, data centres and customer contracts.
CoreWeave has about $50 billion of debt, according to LSEG data, making it one of the largest borrowers linking private credit to the AI buildout.
The cost of insuring its debt against default climbed to about 1,200
basis points this week, while yields on some of its bonds rose to roughly 15% to 16%, signalling sharply increased investor concern over its credit risk.
James Martin, senior US credit strategist at SMBC, said investors were favoring high-yield data-centre financings for projects closer to completion and with fewer hurdles before entering service.
"There is still a price. Investors are still comfortable financing it, but they're demanding more compensation for it," he said, referring to projects further from completion.
Private capital has played a central role in CoreWeave's expansion.
It raised a $2.3 billion facility in 2023 backed by graphics processing units, or GPUs, led by Magnetar Capital and Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, followed by a $7.5 billion facility in 2024 involving Blackstone, Magnetar, Carlyle, BlackRock and other investors.
An $8.5 billion facility raised in March this year was anchored by Blackstone Credit & Insurance.
The implications extend well beyond one borrower.
Alternative asset manager Carlyle said in an October paper that private credit could be called on to finance roughly $1 trillion of the AI-compute buildout, more than half the industry's current assets under management.
It warned that rapid lending into the sector could create concentration risks similar to those that emerged in software lending.
"The clearest lesson is not to avoid AI compute exposure, but to set concentration limits before the buildout accelerates further, not after," Carlyle said.
Some AI loans are backed not only by GPUs but also by long-term customer contracts.
CoreWeave has large commitments from Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta Platforms, while several of its financings use special-purpose vehicles tied to specific infrastructure assets and customer contracts.
That can strengthen the credit by reducing lenders' reliance on the resale value of chips, but it can also create concentration risk if repayment depends heavily on a small number of large customers continuing to honour and renew those contracts.
If funding costs remain elevated, lenders could demand wider spreads, lower leverage, stronger covenants and tighter limits on customer and technology concentration.
Direct-lending funds raised $129.15 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 35% from a year earlier and the highest nine-month total in Preqin data going back to 2016.
Estimated third-quarter lending volume, however, fell 28% year on year to $49.77 billion, according to PitchBook/LCD.
Competition from the syndicated loan market has also intensified.
Some $16.39 billion of direct-lending loans were refinanced in the broadly syndicated market in the third quarter, compared with just $2.60 billion of syndicated loans moving into direct lending, PitchBook/LCD data showed.
(Reporting By Patturaja Murugaboopathy; with additional reporting by Vidya Ranganathan; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
