Latest / In the Loop AI / CoreWeave's Crash Looks Like 2008. Here's Why It Isn't.
Transcript
- 0:00So last week, someone posted a chart online and the entire stock market crashed.
- 0:04CoreWeave was down 15% in 24 hours. Dell was down 11%. Oracle down 9%.
- 0:10In fact, semiconductor stocks were down for eight days in a row,
- 0:14which was the longest losing streak since 2008, where we all know there was
- 0:18a big financial crash. But the thing that puzzles me the most is there doesn't
- 0:22seem to be a reason for this crash to even happen.
- 0:25CoreWeave reported their best revenue earnings up 112% from the year before
- 0:30and $129 billion revenue backlog backed by some big names, Microsoft,
- 0:35Meta, and maybe even Anthropic.
- 0:36If we look at Dell, Oracle, TSMC, they reported their best quarters in history,
- 0:42but their stock still fell.
- 0:43When you talk to Andy Jassy from a quote from an interview last week,
- 0:48he reported that demand has exceeded supply beyond 2028.
- 0:53So he's dealing with capacity constraints for 2029, years in advance.
- 0:57So why then are these companies' stocks failing? We're going to get into why
- 1:01the market is recently dumping the whole CoreWeave debacle and saga on today's
- 1:05episode brought to you by Qualcomm.
- 1:10Now, typically when the market crashes, there's always a number of different
- 1:13factors that are happening.
- 1:15But in this case, it's just to do with one single company and how much they've
- 1:19borrowed to fund their GPU expenditure.
- 1:22Now, CoreWeave, as you probably already know, is what you would call a neocloud,
- 1:25basically a cloud center or an owner of multiple data centers that house GPUs.
- 1:31They rent these GPUs to major AI labs or other hyperscalers so that they can
- 1:36run inference on AI models or train AI models. And CoreWeave specifically has
- 1:40seen a pretty meteoric rise over the last three to four years.
- 1:43They IPO'd last year. Their stock has been doing relatively well.
- 1:46But CoreWeave pivoted. They were originally a GPU company that just served gaming.
- 1:52And then they pivoted into crypto mining back when Bitcoin mining was a huge thing.
- 1:57And then when AI exploded, they were like, hmm, I could repurpose these GPUs simply for AI models.
- 2:03And they ended up getting the biggest valuation and making the most money than they ever had before.
- 2:07And there's been a number of other neoclouds that have popped up,
- 2:09such as IREN, Nebius, Nscale, all which have reached pretty crazy valuations
- 2:15and their revenue catalogs have basically looked like this.
- 2:18Over the last year and a half as the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI,
- 2:21Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon have all signed multi-billion dollar multi-year deals with them.
- 2:28So then what's changed over the last couple of days or weeks that have caused
- 2:32the market to react in this way?
- 2:34Well it all started with one single tweet from Chamath Palihapitiya who is one
- 2:39of the hosts on the All In podcast which I love but also former Meta exec that
- 2:43did pretty well, started his own fund, Social Capital, and I think he stepped away from that.
- 2:47And now he just has really good takes on the AI market and macroeconomic structures in general.
- 2:52And he posted this tweet of a chart. And the chart basically showed the rising
- 2:56yields that CoreWeave had to pay on the debt.
- 3:00Now, this debt was specifically money that they had borrowed to purchase the
- 3:04GPUs that they then rent out to the major companies that I mentioned earlier,
- 3:08like Microsoft, like Meta, like Amazon.
- 3:10So they don't have the money themselves, so they need to borrow the money to
- 3:14buy the GPUs to then sell to other companies.
- 3:17The rate of yield that they had to pay, so the interest that they had to pay,
- 3:20had surged pretty high recently, and it hit 15%, the equivalent of them having
- 3:26to pay around $640 million this quarter.
- 3:30And then Elon Musk replied to this tweet, yikes, five letters,
- 3:34and it crushed the entire stock market.
- 3:36By the end of the week, CoreWeave was down 25%. And then over the following
- 3:41days, other semiconductor or just AI stocks in general brought the entire market
- 3:45down because the market is...
- 3:47Essentially propped up by a lot of AI stocks right now. And it led to around
- 3:51$1.6 trillion being wiped out over semiconductor AI stocks specifically,
- 3:56which is the most part of the capex bubble.
- 3:58And I find this weird because it was even affecting stocks that weren't directly
- 4:02associated with CoreWeave. I understand if it affected other neoclouds or cloud
- 4:06service providers for AI, but it started hitting TSMC, who reported their best quarter in history.
- 4:12That means that there wasn't a single quarter prior to that,
- 4:15that TSMC hadn't beaten. And TSMC basically makes or produces the chips that
- 4:21NVIDIA builds and designs.
- 4:23So they're at a core fundamental piece of this entire market,
- 4:27of this entire AI infrastructure build out, and their stock still fell.
- 4:31So this seemed to be kind of a broader drawdown based off of sentiment that
- 4:36people were, I guess, predicting about this AI CapEx infrastructure build.
- 4:40Now, listen, we've made episodes before talking about how the rise of spending
- 4:46from very few companies, honestly, it's around eight companies, Amazon, Google, Meta,
- 4:51Microsoft, were spending upwards of, I think, $550 billion just this year alone.
- 4:58And they're planning to spend upwards of $1 trillion for next year.
- 5:02And for the first time ever, these companies are breaching into the red, negative cash flow.
- 5:08Listen, we're talking about companies here that have hundreds of billions of
- 5:11dollars on their cash balance sheet.
- 5:13And now that's depleted to zero, such to the point that they need to borrow
- 5:17money. Now, it makes sense that these companies are earning money in many other
- 5:21different ways that aren't necessarily tied to AI. So they are able to fund
- 5:24these different kinds of things.
- 5:26But smaller companies like CoreWeave, like Nebius, like IREN,
- 5:30who are contingent on this AI CapEx bubble still inflating, rely a lot on the
- 5:35financing, which is why we might be seeing worries around this yield thing.
- 5:39So it caused people to panic, understandably. And then finally,
- 5:42on Monday, people started to relax. CoreWeave.
- 5:45Burst up 6.9%, I believe, and Goldman rated CoreWeave a buy.
- 5:50So the question we need to unpack here is, what the hell just happened?
- 5:55And two, is there any substance behind the market drawdown? And what does that
- 5:58tell us about the wider fears around AI in the bubble?
- 6:02Listen, it's no mystery that people are very excited and optimistic,
- 6:06potentially over-investing, whether we are too levered up and there's a private
- 6:11credit bubble, to Chamath's point last week.
- 6:13So let me try and unpack what's happening here.
- 6:16Think of CoreWeave as a landlord. They purchased 51 apartments.
- 6:20The apartments in this case are data centers. They're very expensive, very cost intensive.
- 6:26So they borrowed money to be able to purchase these apartments.
- 6:29And then what they've done is they've leased these apartments out for use for
- 6:33the likes of Microsoft, Meta, people who are paying them rent effectively.
- 6:37Now, for them to be able to borrow this money is the equivalent of taking out
- 6:41an expensive mortgage or just a mortgage in general.
- 6:44And the issue is, more recently, mortgage payments or the mortgage rates have
- 6:48skyrocketed to the point where they've had to pay back $640 million of the recent
- 6:54quarter, the last three months.
- 6:56Now, in CoreWeave's defense, they've been making money on the renting out.
- 6:59They made around $2.6 billion in the last quarter.
- 7:03And technically, they should be profitable after costs. I think after OPEX and
- 7:08CAPEX costs, they're down to about $1.5 billion.
- 7:11But now they have to pay near or almost more than half of that back to these mortgage payments.
- 7:17And next year, they're projected to pay $300 million more on top of that for
- 7:22the mortgage rates, bringing them to $900 million.
- 7:26So with all things balanced out on their books, they actually are down $626 million.
- 7:33Not great. And listen, this could be something that CoreWeave could deal with
- 7:36if this was a static number, but they're actually ramping up spending.
- 7:40CoreWeave is set to spend around $6.4 billion on new data centers over the next three months.
- 7:45So you can imagine the gap is widening behind the debt that they have to pay
- 7:50back and the money that they're actually spending for the future versus the
- 7:53money that they're actually making.
- 7:54Now their debt has risen to about $35 billion and $10 billion of those dollars
- 7:59needs to be paid back in the next 15 months. So,
- 8:03and they only have $5.5 billion of cash on their balance sheet.
- 8:07So the question is obvious to everyone. How on earth do they plan to pay any of this back in time?
- 8:13And when someone ran the stats online, it basically looked like a coin flip
- 8:16as to whether CoreWeave was going to default over the next three years.
- 8:2155%. Now, Chamath's point wasn't necessarily sell all your entire stock in CoreWeave
- 8:26and the entire AM market.
- 8:28He was just pointing out a trend that could potentially become very cumbersome
- 8:32or worrying if it continued to grow.
- 8:34He pointed out that two months ago, the mortgage payment or the mortgage rate
- 8:38that CoreWeave had to pay back on their debt was only 10%.
- 8:41And since those eight weeks have happened, it's risen another 5% and it's projected
- 8:45to rise another 5% and it may keep on going to the point where CoreWeave needs
- 8:49to default on some of their loans.
- 8:51He's just looking at where the smart money is thinking about CoreWeave,
- 8:56Neoclouds and just borrowing in general for AI expenditure.
- 8:59He basically says that, listen, the bond yields basically are the effective
- 9:04rate that the insurance market will be willing to pay or price the debt that CoreWeave is taking on.
- 9:12And so right now it's 15%. Two months ago, it was 10%.
- 9:15And his idea is basically the insurance providers, the people who are lending
- 9:20them the money, the people who are going to get paid back the money first when
- 9:23CoreWeave has the money,
- 9:25are pricing this as a very expensive risk to the point where they think that
- 9:29CoreWeave at a coin toss might default over the next three to five years.
- 9:33And he's saying the aggregate of CoreWeave's debt balance sheet,
- 9:37the money that they have on their balance sheet, which is around $5.5 billion.
- 9:42And then the rates that are increasing collectively might end up becoming a
- 9:46problem for them, especially as CoreWeave is aggressively spending more and
- 9:50more money to acquire more data centers.
- 9:52It's worth pointing out that I think two to three years ago, they only had
- 9:55three data centers and now they have 51 data centers and they're planning to
- 9:58spend six and a half billion dollars over the next three months so he's pointing
- 10:02out that like hey listen we might need to slow down you might need to cut your
- 10:05costs a little bit we're not saying throw in the towel by any means
- 10:08but slow the hell down or we're going to end up in a dot-com type
- 10:12bubble that is definitely going to burst at least what CoreWeave and some of
- 10:16the neoclouds are doing so i thought about this a bit and Chamath's point definitely
- 10:20stands and i think he's right to kind of wave the flag and, you know, warn people of this.
- 10:25But I think the market may have potentially overreacted. It's funny because
- 10:29they had the CoreWeave CEO come on to the All In podcast, I think like three
- 10:33weeks ago, I remember watching it.
- 10:34And I remember him explicitly describing how the financing of these different deals work.
- 10:40So let's say, for example, CoreWeave signed a major deal, multi-billion dollar
- 10:44deal with Microsoft, which they did a few months ago, and we reported on it
- 10:48on this show and he basically said.
- 10:51He built something called a box obviously this is metaphorical but he treats it as a box
- 10:56and in that box the first round of financing comes from the customer themselves so
- 11:01CoreWeave signs what's known as a long-term agreement which is essentially
- 11:05a promise that microsoft in this instance will need to spend a certain amount or all of the.
- 11:14Even if they don't take the compute off of CoreWeave's hands.
- 11:17So in the event that Microsoft didn't want to take the compute or they didn't
- 11:20need the compute, they would still need to pay for it.
- 11:23The entire point here is that each deal that CoreWeave signs is locked in its own box.
- 11:29And the money that goes towards paying for the GPUs, the CapEx,
- 11:33the power, the electricity, the land that is needed to basically make this data
- 11:39center come alive and serve that actual customer
- 11:42is paid for by that customer. It comes in that rental payment.
- 11:45And then only after that does CoreWeave actually take any money.
- 11:49But it gets even better. The CoreWeave founder also spoke about the revenue backlog.
- 11:54They have around $129 billion, last time I checked, which was yesterday,
- 12:00over the next couple of years to 2032.
- 12:03So that's a lot of money, but also 98% of it is technically or contractually.
- 12:09Uncancellable, which means that they've signed pretty crazy,
- 12:13lengthy, long-term agreements with these big companies who have presumably financed
- 12:18on much better ratings because, you know, they are Microsoft,
- 12:21they are Google, they are Meta.
- 12:22From CoreWeave's perspective, they have money in the bag and it may not be in
- 12:27the bag right now, but contractually they do have it.
- 12:30But let's also assume that, you know, even all of those things are in jeopardy.
- 12:34They have the bank of NVIDIA backstopping them. Jensen Huang and NVIDIA recently
- 12:39said that any capacity that goes unfilled for CoreWeave specifically, they will fill.
- 12:46They will pay for up until 2032. NVIDIA is also a major or big investor in CoreWeave.
- 12:52Jensen Tuong, after this entire media blitz happened over the last couple of
- 12:56days, came out and said, I've looked at CoreWeave's books.
- 12:59I know the founders. I know exactly the deals that they're financed.
- 13:02And trust me, they're good.
- 13:04They're better than ever. And he quoted the 112% revenue gain that they had
- 13:08despite the stock dumping.
- 13:10So while it might seem analogous to the 2008 financial crisis,
- 13:15which, you know, you had credit default sops back then, it's a similar instrument
- 13:19to what we're seeing with the bonds and the insurance market right here.
- 13:21It's easy to make it seem like an apples to apples comparison,
- 13:24but my take is that it's simply not.
- 13:27In this event, yeah, we do see massive scaling and slightly levered financing,
- 13:32but it's nowhere near the point that we had at the dotcom bubble burst.
- 13:36It's certainly something that we should keep an eye on. And I think Chamath
- 13:39calling out the rates increasing is definitely a worthy thing to do.
- 13:43But I think the market's reaction is...
- 13:46I guess, overreacted to the entire thing. And the other near cloud founders
- 13:49actually backed CoreWeave up.
- 13:51You had the founder of IREN and Nebius, and I think I saw Nscale also come online
- 13:57and basically say or echo something similar to what CoreWeave said around their whole box.
- 14:01They said, listen, we're not taking on massive amounts of debt and spreading
- 14:05that around to any and every customer. We silo it in these boxes.
- 14:08And the tenants, in this case, whoever they sign a deal with,
- 14:11Anthropic, OpenAI, whoever, are the ones that pay for the majority of the CapEx
- 14:15first. So we are actually actively paying back these different loans.
- 14:18And the future guarantee of these $129 billion worth of revenue backlog,
- 14:24in CoreWeave's case, is going to do the same thing.
- 14:26In fact, Nscale specifically, they signed a $45 billion deal with Anthropic
- 14:32earlier this year, because Anthropic obviously needs a lot more compute to train
- 14:36and influence their clawed models ahead of their Blockbuster IPO.
- 14:39So yesterday, they announced another $45 billion deal with Nscale.
- 14:44So if these neoclouds were truly in jeopardy, putting CoreWeave aside and just
- 14:49looking at neoclouds in general, would they still be signing these deals?
- 14:52Probably not. But then again, Anthropic has also committed to half a trillion
- 14:56dollars worth of capex spend over the next three to five years.
- 15:01And their revenue has slowed down to about 45% quarter of a quarter.
- 15:05The quarter before that was 110%.
- 15:08So, you know, doomers or negative speculators are basically saying that maybe
- 15:12their revenue is slowing down and this could culminate in the bubble bursting.
- 15:16I personally have no idea. I wish I could look into the financials of all of
- 15:18these, but this is just generally what the structure of things look like.
- 15:22OK, so then stepping back from all of this, what's the bull and bear case for
- 15:26all of this? Is there any actual substance to this drawdown or are we about
- 15:29to recover? Let's get into it on today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.
- 15:36Let's start with the bear case, because it was the first thing that I listed down here.
- 15:40So number one, can CoreWeave actually pay back their debt? They're burning around
- 15:44$5.7 billion per quarter.
- 15:47We don't know the structure of the contracts. So how soon they're going to get
- 15:51some money from that $129 billion backlog, whether it's in enough time to pay all of this back.
- 15:56And then also, we don't know where the bond rates are going to be.
- 15:59If two months ago, they were at 10% and now they're at 15%, they could be at
- 16:0220%, God forbid, 25% in the next two months, there's a lot of factors that could be at risk here.
- 16:08But also, CoreWeave has a customer concentration risk.
- 16:12I looked into the reports or the finances from their previous quarterly earnings,
- 16:16and I saw that three customers account for 36%, 22%, and 12% respectively for their revenue backlog.
- 16:25That is a huge customer concentration risk. And listen, it's not weird to see
- 16:29these kinds of things. These are large-scale enterprise contracts.
- 16:32Anthropic, even though they're dealing with a lot of consumer appetite through
- 16:36subscription revenue are also making most of their money through enterprise.
- 16:40So is OpenAI, by the way. I think their enterprise revenue recently flipped
- 16:44consumer revenue. The point is, enterprise contracts are meant to be concentrated and large.
- 16:48Though in CoreWeave's case, relatively to how much money that they're making.
- 16:52It's a large chunk of their balance sheet. And then another point is something
- 16:55that Ben Horowitz brought up last week, which was this,
- 16:59is kind of giving us feelings of the 1999 bandwidth expansion where everyone
- 17:04in telecoms was just buying up phone lines, building up these internet lines,
- 17:08and putting a lot of money into the piping for this entire internet era.
- 17:13And they ended up becoming a massive oversupply and that entire thing crashed,
- 17:17which is what led to the dot-com burst. I don't quite think that this is the
- 17:21same thing here because of one major constraint.
- 17:25We can't bring compute online quick enough. We are constrained by power, land, power, and shell.
- 17:31We're constrained by electricity. We're constrained by physical atoms.
- 17:34And honestly, I'm tempted to make another episode about this individually because
- 17:38it highlights a really good investment opportunity, but also what is holding
- 17:42the AI capex spend out back.
- 17:44Weirdly, this might have a second effect where it ends up being a really good
- 17:49thing for the build out so that we don't build too fast like we did back in the telecom era.
- 17:53And then the final point I'll make is that the bank of NVIDIA is a precarious thing.
- 17:59I get that they're the most valuable company in the world, but backstopping
- 18:02all these different deals, which are probably worth north of $1.1 trillion is
- 18:07potentially a dangerous thing.
- 18:08Like a 25% decline in Nvidia stock could cause an entire catastrophe.
- 18:13Okay, so then what's the bull case? Well, the first one is Andy Jassy,
- 18:16CEO of Amazon, in his comment last week, which basically implied,
- 18:20or actually it didn't imply, it stated that demand had exceeded beyond 2028.
- 18:26Now, that is part of a wider trend that we're seeing across hyperscalers and
- 18:30just AI CapEx compared to the dot-com era where there's actually demand for
- 18:34these things. People are willing to put up and pay a lot of money for the supply
- 18:39that is being created here.
- 18:41Back in the dot-com era, no one wanted to buy the thing. There wasn't that much demand.
- 18:45The difference here is not only are they willing to pay for it,
- 18:48but they're willing to pay a premium for it.
- 18:50GPU prices on the secondary market are at the highest that they've ever been. GPUs that.
- 18:56Cost a certain amount when they debuted, when they first got created,
- 18:59are now worth twice that despite being five to 10 years older. Think about that.
- 19:04An old janky piece of metal is worth twice more than when it was originally debuted.
- 19:08So the idea here is that demand is off the charts. People are paying for these things.
- 19:12But of course, the question then becomes, will this be sustainable over time?
- 19:16The other bull case is people are mistakenly calling out CoreWeave's financing
- 19:20to be specifically siloed to them, but that's not necessarily true.
- 19:24You should look at the customers who are paying them the money in the first place.
- 19:28Microsoft, Meta, Google, they are the ones that are getting really attractive
- 19:32mortgage rates, if we want to continue the analogy, on all of these different
- 19:35deals. So they are able to finance and provide the money that is necessary for all these things.
- 19:42I find it funny that Elon Musk created this or was partly responsible for creating
- 19:47this market downturn by responding, yikes, to Chamath's original tweet, where,
- 19:51literally yesterday he posted a tweet saying, my conversations with neoclouds
- 19:55are the most difficult that they've ever been because no one wants to sell me compute.
- 19:59Even though they have these GPUs, they've already pre-sold it at a much higher
- 20:03premium rate to all these other companies.
- 20:04So there's huge market demand even for the biggest players that want to purchase this at a premium.
- 20:10And the final thing I'll say is the power constraint, the bottleneck that I
- 20:14referenced earlier in this episode, is a real thing and might actually end up
- 20:19playing in CoreWeave and the entire market's favor.
- 20:22As much as people want to spend money, as much as people want to create GPUs,
- 20:27computes, data centers, and sell that for as much money as they can,
- 20:31they physically can't because we don't have the technical know-how,
- 20:34the land, the leasing, the regulations in our favor to build as fast as we want
- 20:39to. The dot-com era, we could.
- 20:41Right now in the AI era, CapEx Builder, right as it stands right now, we cannot.
- 20:45There's too much bloat, there's too much regulatory red tape,
- 20:49And there's too much, honestly, humans and human atoms that need to be moved
- 20:53that hasn't been galvanized at this point.
- 20:55It's the point that Gavin Baker frequently makes in all of his posts about this
- 20:58stuff. And he's one of the most knowledgeable folk in AI capex spend out in general.
- 21:02So given this entire summary, the CoreWeave thing was a necessary warning signal to make people aware.
- 21:09But I think the market downturn, people's reaction to this entire thing is overdrawn.
- 21:15And that's probably why we're seeing CoreWeave starting to recover,
- 21:18the markets start to bottom.
- 21:20And I think that it probably resonates with people's.
- 21:24Kind of concerned with seeing such a major explosion of investment.
- 21:29I think I saw a stat somewhere where 75% of all general VC investment this year has been on AI.
- 21:36We've never seen that happen for any other technology explosion,
- 21:38even for blockchain and crypto over the last couple of years, even with biotech.
- 21:42And now with AI consuming pretty much anything and everything,
- 21:45it's understandable that people are potentially concerned about overspending here.
- 21:50And I think we should keep honestly calling out the warning signals so that
- 21:53we can keep ourselves accountable for this entire thing
- 21:56so yeah i hope you enjoyed this episode i hope some of this made sense to you
- 21:59i was trying to unpack all of this over the weekend and i wanted to create a
- 22:02compelling episode that you know you the audience could actually understand
- 22:06so let me know if this was helpful or if i missed anything let me know
- 22:09for those of you who have been listening to our episodes especially with the
- 22:12new format of the show we are tweaking different things as you can tell this
- 22:15is a different camera angle we're trying to make it more personal try and recreate
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