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Core Scientific, Inc.

CORZ

11 stories

$4.4B Market cap · 2026-10-22

@convequity 3 clicks

Convequity on X

$CRWV 5-year CDS hit a record ~1,195bp on 15 Oct and the whole neocloud group sold off with it. Our ABBX tracker suggests the market is pricing contagion into the wrong names. The balance sheet first. At 30 June CoreWeave had $35.6B of debt against $5.5B of cash, and its ~$33B market cap now sits below its debt. $4.4B falls due in the rest of 2026 and $6.2B in 2027, mostly loan amortisation; no bond matures before 2030. Its 9.625% notes sold at par in June now yield ~14.9%. Add $16.3B of lease liabilities and $35.5B of leases not yet started. CoreWeave's Q2 operating cash flow: Net loss: −$0.63B + Depreciation & amortisation: +$1.39B + Stock-based comp: +$0.17B + Other non-cash items: +$0.28B − Working capital (payables, receivables, prepaids): −$1.32B + Customer prepayments: +$0.79B = Operating cash flow: $0.68B The core business makes cash, but working capital ate it. Without the prepayments OCF was −$0.11B. That OCF is already after ~$0.44B of cash interest, equal to 65% of it, and capex ran 9.5x OCF. Funding is where the group splits. CoreWeave builds with borrowed money: GPU-backed loans, 8.5–9.75% bonds and vendor credit, with ~$9.8B of H1 equipment supplier-financed outside the cash-flow statement. Prepayments covered 12% of its Q2 capex. $NBIS builds with convertibles (~$9B this year) and prepayments that covered 21% of Q2 capex; at 30 June it held $8.5B of debt against $8.0B of cash. $IREN builds with equity, a $3B 1% convertible and prepayments that covered 87% of its latest quarter's capex; net debt is ~$1.7B and cash interest equalled ~1% of OCF. The exposure that matters is its landlords. CoreWeave is ~77% of $CORZ revenue, the tenant at Galaxy's Helios campus and leases 400MW from $APLD. Yet since 2 Oct Core Scientific is down 17%, while Microsoft-anchored IREN is down 34% and Nebius 30%. Our view: the risk is CoreWeave's debt-funded build, not the neocloud model. If CoreWeave stumbles, the hit lands on the landlords that depend on its rent. Nebius and IREN share the model, not the funding.
@ACapitalLP 52 clicks

A Capital on X

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙉𝙚𝙤𝙘𝙡𝙤𝙪𝙙 / 𝘼𝙄/𝙃𝙋𝘾 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙠: I like distilling complex topics down to plain English. Here’s my understanding of what happened. Please correct where wrong… $CRWV and its peers rent $NVDA GPUs to AI labs and hyperscalers under multi-year take-or-pay contracts. The capex is so large relative to cash flow that the model only works if they can keep raising tens of billions a year in new financing to build what customers have already signed for. Much of that comes from secured loans backed by specific chips and contracts, while the rest comes from unsecured bonds, converts or stock. Importantly, not all secured debt is non-recourse, and many of $CRWV’s GPU loans are guaranteed by the parent. Still, the secured facilities held up considerably better than the unsecured bonds, which went from ~12% to ~15% yields, while the cost of insuring them via CDS roughly doubled… Nothing fundamental appears to have caused it. No major customer walked, GPU pricing held up, and the quarter looks fine. What happened was a cluster of headlines landing on a nervous market with the 10-year near 5.2% and hundreds of billions of AI debt issuance expected: Chamath calling it a private-credit bubble, an analyst saying the equity could go to zero, Gartner forecasting that over 80% of neoclouds stop operating independently by 2030, a few smaller peers failing to get IPOs and debt deals done. Underneath sat the bigger question of whether neoclouds are durable businesses or really just financing wrappers that hyperscalers eventually insource and cheap open-source models undercut. Once investors doubt the parent can fund growth, the stock falls, which makes the equity leg more dilutive, which worries bondholders more. Credit and equity fed on each other and the whole group fell 10-30% in sympathy. Was it justified? In three parts. (1) The $CRWV unsecured bond move was likely overdone: a company with ~$17bn of liquidity and a $129bn contracted backlog doesn’t suddenly become a distressed credit because of a handful of headlines. But backlog isn’t cash flow, and secured lenders have first claim on specific assets and cash flows, with many loans also carrying parent guarantees. The question for unsecured creditors is how much cash actually makes it back to the parent after servicing the secured debt. Still, a move to ~15% yields looks more like aggressive HF de-risking with headlines as the accelerant than a sudden collapse in the underlying business. (2) The $CRWV equity move was more understandable, just not for the headline reasons: this is a levered financing business whose equity returns depend on the cost of the marginal dollar of capital. When financing gets more expensive, the residual value on every future GW shrinks, and any gap that needs to be filled with equity becomes more dilutive. That said, unsecured bonds trading at 15% doesn’t mean every new GPU deployment costs 15% to finance. A 20% haircut for a stock that may not self-fund until 2030 could be seen as fair, but it ultimately depends on how much parent-level capital is actually required. (3) The group ($CORZ, $CIFR, $WULF) selloff was the least justified: $CRWV finances depreciating GPUs and bears the risk of obsolescence and replacement. The miners converting to HPC are increasingly financing long-lived power and data center infrastructure leased to hyperscalers under 15-20 year contracts, often with the customer owning the GPUs. Their risks are construction, power delivery and financing, not GPU replacement or compute pricing. Different assets, different contracts, different capital structures. Yet the market sold them as though they had the same problem, and that’s where the mispricing most likely sits…
@kevin__mak 3 clicks

Kevin Mak on X

$CORZ Some quick notes on this one. 1) In my view, CORZ has the most economically advantaged deal in the entire HPC industry. Their series of ~590mw of deals with CRWV was heavily tilted in their favor, and no deal after that has the same terms. 2) That deal is 70%+ finished construction, so there's no "if they get it built", it's largely built and should be fully built by early 2027. 3) According to CFO Jim Nygaard, the CRWV infrastructure cost $5.5B but would cost $7.5B to rebuild today, and CORZ holds the first lien. I call this a “capex put,” because IF there’s a problem with CRWV paying its contracts, CORZ has a claim on substantial infrastructure that could be re-leased to another customer. Depending on assumptions (discount rate, terminal value, etc), I see this as being worth $10-$13 per share in todays terms. They still have a ~530MW deal with AMD, plus another 1.5GW of "future expansion". The upside of CORZ is not the same as the other HPC/neocloud type plays. There's very little/no scenarios where I can see this stock going up by 5-10x. But the downside scenario is also very different. This is significantly less risky than its peers, yet, in this indiscriminate "vibes/basket" based market, it often trades very similarly. There lies the opportunity. When the market treats different assets as the same, because nobody cares about the nuance anymore. Positioning: I sold all of my shares between $20-$26 per share and thought I was done with CORZ forever. It's a pleasant surprise to be able to buy them back sub $15. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds positions in CORZ. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.
@convequity 6 clicks

Convequity on X

OpenAI and Anthropic will rent most of the AI capacity they plan, but mainly from the big clouds rather than the listed neoclouds Convequity's AI Bubble Barometer (ABBX) tracks the data-centre capacity each company plans and how much of it it expects to rent from partners rather than own. 1. OpenAI plans 21.2 GW, of which 18.0 GW is to be supplied by partners. Anthropic plans 13.8 GW, all of it from partners. Together the two labs plan to rent 31.8 GW. 2. That is 2.8 times the 11.2 GW that the five hyperscalers, $MSFT, $AMZN, $GOOGL, $META and $ORCL, plan to rent from others. 3. The labs' named suppliers are mostly AWS, Oracle, Google, Azure and SB Energy. CoreWeave, a listed neocloud, and Nscale, a private one, appear on the lists, but the bulk of the 31.8 GW is not with listed neoclouds. 4. The seven listed neoclouds, $CRWV, $NBIS, $IREN, $APLD, $CORZ, $CIFR and $BTDR, plan to build 33.62 GW of their own. Much of that is gross site power rather than contracted IT capacity. 5. The labs are also behind most of the recent growth in AI capacity plans. Since 14 Jul, the total capacity that the 15 ABBX companies say they plan to have has risen by 22.19 GW, from 131.23 GW to 153.42 GW on 7 Oct. OpenAI and Anthropic raising their own plans accounts for 13.7 GW of that rise (62%). We think the labs' rental demand mainly supports $AMZN, $ORCL, $GOOGL and $MSFT. The neoclouds will need to fill their pipelines largely with other customers, including the hyperscalers' own 11.2 GW of planned rentals, so we would not read the labs' plans as demand for the neoclouds.
@convequity 4 clicks

Convequity on X

Neoclouds trade at 2.6x invested capital, less than half the hyperscalers' 6.1x The seven neoclouds in Convequity's AI Bubble Barometer (ABBX), $CRWV, $NBIS, $IREN, $APLD, $CORZ, $CIFR and $BTDR, lost 7.2% of their combined enterprise value this week, from $190.2B at the 2 Oct close to $176.5B at the 9 Oct close. Over the same week the five hyperscalers, $MSFT, $AMZN, $GOOGL, $META and $ORCL, gained 2.4%, from $13,316B to $13,637B. 1. Enterprise value divided by invested capital (EV/IC) at the 9 Oct close was 2.6x for the neoclouds and 6.1x for the hyperscalers. At the 2 Oct close it was 2.8x and 6.0x. 2. ABBX estimates the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) at 14.6% for the neoclouds and 9.7% for the hyperscalers. 3. At the 9 Oct close, neocloud share prices were 20% to 45% below each stock's best Friday close since 17 Jul: CIFR −44.5%, CORZ −33.3%, BTDR −25.8%, IREN −24.6%, APLD −24.1%, CRWV −22.0% and NBIS −20.4%. Among the hyperscalers, ORCL was 10.9% below its best, AMZN and META 4.4% and GOOGL 1.3%, while MSFT closed above its best. We think most of the discount reflects the neoclouds' higher cost of capital rather than a mispricing. We would not call 2.6x cheap until they report their July to September backlog and customer prepayment figures.

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