CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market in recent weeks, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter. These three — “neoclouds” in the jargon — borrow heavily to buy data centers and AI servers, then resell the compute. That makes them the spot in the system where rising rates hurt first.
What this means for Anthropic
Two numbers from the same report. Anthropic is aiming for a $100 billion offering in mid-November. And the $63 billion Broadcom deal we covered last week only closed because Broadcom CEO Hock Tan personally entered the negotiations at the last minute to calm the banks’ nerves.
Anthropic itself put a matching risk factor into the S-1: the financing constraints facing the electrical-power providers its data centers depend on.
What the credit market looks like
Bank of America puts AI-linked issuance across US corporate debt markets at $394 billion in 2025 and $655 billion through mid-October this year. Analysts forecast nearly $1 trillion next year. Meanwhile bonds issued by SpaceX and Meta are trading at steep discounts.
Dan Ivascyn, chief investment officer at Pimco, describes the new terms plainly: “The bar is going higher and higher in terms of proving to lenders that this investment will turn into sufficient revenue. The weak links are going to suffer first.” The weak links are easy to name here. Nscale’s plan to go public next month has been thwarted, Lambda dialed back the valuation it was seeking, and Nebius’s first high-yield bond offering never materialized after its bankers set up meetings with fund managers.
Where the neoclouds came from
Many started as crypto-mining outfits and have scant history running AI infrastructure. Nebius was once the Amsterdam-based company behind Yandex; it divested its main assets after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and pivoted to AI cloud a little over two years ago, winning contracts with Meta and Microsoft among others. Since 2024 it has sold roughly $2.7 billion in stock to Nvidia and other investors, plus billions more in convertible bonds.
Meta was unusually candid about the reason for its plan to raise up to $97.5 billion in new stock offerings: in a securities filing it pointed to upcoming offerings from Alphabet, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI as a test of how deep capital markets really are.
The race is now a race against the clock
“Everybody is trying to raise money for their build-outs before the liquidity dries up,” Ben Connard of Carnegie Investment Counsel told the Journal. So if you are wondering why Anthropic is going public right now, with the Nasdaq down 2.9% on Friday and Intel down 29%: the alternative is not a nicer window in spring. The alternative is queuing behind four other companies.