Shares of CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) are down 7% Tuesday morning to $98.11, an outlier decline on a day when the broader cloud software basket trades higher. The catalyst is rising Treasury yields rather than any change in AI demand.
The 10-year Treasury yield sits at 4.73%, near the top of its 52-week range of 3.95% to 4.75%. For the most debt-dependent name in AI infrastructure, that repricing hits harder than for any listed peer. Our coverage of David Tepper’s disclosed second-quarter positions discussed CoreWeave’s capital structure earlier today.
Why Yields Are the Story
CoreWeave finances multi-billion-dollar data center construction with borrowed money, and much of its earnings sit years in the future. Higher yields raise both the interest cost on that debt and the discount rate applied to those future cash flows. Both dials moved against the stock at once.
The Q2 2026 balance sheet spells out the exposure. Interest expense reached $640 million in the quarter, debt-to-equity sits at 8.94, and net debt to EBITDA is 10.75.
The bull case is real. Second-quarter revenue doubled to $2.575 billion, backlog stands at $104 billion, and adjusted EBITDA margin is 59%. The net loss came in narrower than analysts had modeled.
Meanwhile, the bear case is that deeply negative free cash flow requires continuous capital markets access, and cost of sales rose 180% last quarter, matching the pace of the two prior quarters. A business with a 59% adjusted EBITDA margin and a $104 billion backlog still faces a first-order cost-of-money problem, with $640 million of interest expense and net debt to EBITDA of 10.75 keeping the equity sensitive to rates.
Peers Are Barely Moving
Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS | NBIS Price Prediction) stock is down 0.9% to $266.50, essentially flat. The company is also leveraged, with roughly $10 billion in aggregate convertible principal across six series maturing from 2029 to 2033, plus a $775 million senior secured facility collateralized by GPU infrastructure and contracted cash flows. Remaining performance obligations stand at $37.5 billion, anchored by a five-year, $12 billion deal with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META).
Debt alone doesn’t explain the divergence. CoreWeave’s specific ratios and its far larger negative free cash flow separate it from Nebius, though Nebius carries its own customer concentration risk with three customers each representing more than 10% of quarterly revenue. Cloudflare (NYSE:NET) stock, the connectivity cloud and security platform, is down 1% to $303.82. Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) shares, the cloud data platform, are down 0.3% to $329.03, effectively unchanged.
Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) stock is down 24% year to date through Monday’s close, the one large AI-cloud name in the red for 2026. Through Monday, CoreWeave shares were up 48%, Nebius stock up 221%, Cloudflare stock up 56%, and Snowflake stock up 50% for the year.
WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (NASDAQ:WCLD) shares are up 2% to $40.65, and the fund is up 14% year to date through Monday. The WCLD fund is a thematic vehicle carrying concentration risk relative to the broad market, and it isn’t leveraged. A green print in WCLD stock while CoreWeave stock is sinking 7% is the clearest available evidence that Tuesday is a cost-of-capital story for CoreWeave specifically.
What to Watch
CoreWeave has roughly 1.5 GW of active data center power and targets more than 8 GW by 2030. The expansion pipeline includes a 250-MW greenfield campus in Kenilworth, New Jersey, a Lancaster, Pennsylvania site planned initially at 100 MW with potential to reach 300 MW, and two Stockholm colocation campuses. Management added eight data centers under construction or brought online in the second quarter, taking the global footprint to roughly 51 facilities (we profiled seven of the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind this kind of AI buildout in a free report).
Investors can watch for a break in the 10-year yield above its 52-week high. The next CoreWeave debt issuance and whether it prices at a wider spread than recent deals is the immediate signal for the credit market. Free cash flow direction is the other open question as contracted capacity converts to recognized revenue.
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